


Push

by phoenixreal



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Healing, Het and Slash, Humiliation, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Assault, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protection, Rape, Rape Aftermath, Rape Trauma Syndrome, Revenge, Romance, Suicide Attempt, Team Bonding, Ten Rings Memories, Torture, past bullying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 12:23:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixreal/pseuds/phoenixreal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark was known for pissing people off, it was a given. Then, after the man everyone thought was nothing more than a selfish prick decided to nearly kill himself saving Manhattan from a nuclear bomb, even the most sure of Tony's bastard status had to rethink it. And then, his team who were sure they had him pegged, they were invited (ordered) to move into Stark Tower with him. To their surprise, they found he had furnished full floors for each of them, somehow knowing their tastes exactly, including a floor dedicated to the resident Asgardian who would only be there some of the time. Surprised, and please, they all wonder at the enigma that is their host. After a couple months, Pepper Potts stops coming around so much, and they realize that something has exchanged between them because they are rather professional to each other. Pepper still frets over Tony, but instead tells the others to keep an eye on him rather than doing it herself. They easily forget that Tony is, and always has been, simply a human civilian. Then things get strange when they find themselves locked down within Stark tower, and after a harrowing viewing of a mysterious video, they find their resident playboy is completely gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lockdown

**Author's Note:**

> IN REWRITE as of May 2016

New York City was a new place these days.  In the last few years, things like aliens and Norse gods had walked the world.  People were beginning to see “super” things everywhere.  There was more than one vigilante in New York now, these “powered people”, and those fought for the “common” people. Life was short and there were very large things out there that could kill you.  Some people blamed these super heroes; because of course they had damaged the city in their fight.  These people believed that these “heroes” were no better than the villains.  The believed that they should have saved everyone.  The brokered no excuse for the collateral damage that occurred.  Some people defended the heroes, because even though there had been damage, it was far better than being enslaved to an alien race.  These people were happy to remind them that the government had tried to nuke the island rather than let these aliens take over.  These defenders of the heroes were as vocal as their opponents.  Fights had broken out in bars, in shopping malls, and more over the situations.  The entire world had been changed.

The Avengers, meanwhile, still existed, on a mission to find the staff that Loki had brought to Earth during the invasion.  Some important things had been revealed to people over the years since the fateful day in New York. Mainly, the staff was powerful in the extreme, and somehow, there was significance to the glowing stone in it.  Banter had been exchanged that the staff had been driving Loki’s invasion, and according to Thor, after the near death of his brother recently, lots of things had changed.  Thor had come to a startling conclusion that his brother was a victim, and that he was at fault for letting it happen.  He had become insistent on righting the wrongs that Loki had caused because he felt responsible for his actions.

The resurgence Hydra had been devastating to so many, and the emergence of this “inhuman” situation had been surprising for some, but not unexpected for others.  That fact that there were so many people with powers possible in the world was incredibly liberating for some, yet horrifically scary for others.  That was how Hydra had planned things.  Hydra was one of those things that were insidious in the worst ways, an organization that could turn good people toward evil.

With all these heavy issues weighing on the heroes of the earth, though, there had to be time to rest and relax.

“Movie night!” Clint exclaimed, sticking his head into the large lab where Bruce Banner was looking down into a microscope beside a scrawny brunette.  Bruce looked up smiling at the archer SHIELD agent.

“What’s on the agenda tonight?” Bruce said, pushing his glasses up his nose a bit and glancing at the young man beside him.

Clint grinned.  “We’re working on getting Cap and Thor up to date on cultural references, so it is totally a Star Wars marathon tonight.  Well, until they start falling asleep.  We’re at least getting through episode one and two. It was a fight, but I convinced Tony that watching them in release order was more confusing than in chronological order. Once we’re done with that it’s the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings stuff.  You two coming?  Or you gonna stay and science?”

Bruce smiled at him with a soft nod.  “Sure, I’ll go drag up the hermit from his workshop.  Peter?”

“Great, seeing how I think you’re the only one that can open the door,” Clint said with a halfway smirk.  Clint knew very well that Tony, while becoming more open with the other members of the team, was still not completely comfortable with everyone having access to his most private space.  That workshop was nearly sacred to him.

Peter smiled and shook his head at the other two men without looking up from his work.  “Nah, Doc, I’ll stay here.  I’m finally getting somewhere.  I’ve gotta thank you again for talking Mr. Stark into letting me use the lab.”

Clint snorted.  “Mr. Stark.  That’s funny,” he muttered as he headed out and back to the main common room.  No one referred to him as Mr. Stark, and it was incredibly amusing to see the young man use it. He shook his head and left the bemused Bruce with Peter to their bromance.  He’d tell Natasha he better watch out, or Bruce was going to be smitten by a younger suiter. 

Bruce shook his head.  “Just call him Tony, Peter; you have the biggest case of hero worship I’ve ever seen for that man.”

Peter Parker, otherwise known as Spiderman, grinned at the doctor.  “Yeah, but he’s like, awesome.  And he helped me with the web shooters already without me asking and well, yeah.  Just letting me in this lab is worth so much…I mean, I can’t get access to any of this equipment at the university…”

“Believe me, I know,” Bruce told him, shaking his head.  “I couldn’t believe it when he asked me to come stay here.”

Peter sighed, then, his smile faltering.  “I’ve been thinking, you know, about the offer, to work with the Avengers, like on a regular basis instead of just, you know, freelancing.”

“Oh?  I thought you didn’t want to go with a team environment?  Didn’t you call yourself a strictly solo act?”

Peter shook his head.  “Nah, it’s not really that, I just…with the fact I’m considered a vigilante and you’re all real _heroes_.  I just…Gwen, my girlfriend, she’s been telling me that I need to move forward with who I am.  She knows what I do, but it just is so hard to listen to her sometimes when the voice in the back of my head tells me that I’m not good enough to be an Avenger.”  Peter snorted and smiled.  “Hell, sometimes it tells me I’m not good enough to be Gwen’s boyfriend.”

“I’ll have Tony come talk to you one of these days about how much care to give public perception, and how being a hero isn’t all about being heroic…well, not all the time,” Bruce muttered.  “Ask JARVIS if you need anything, sure you won’t join us?”

The blond teen waved as he buried himself in the microscope.  “Nah, seen it several times, and as much as I enjoy watching the blonde twosome fret over cultural references, I want to finish this before I go home.  I need the data for the professor tomorrow in biology.”

“Okay, see you later, Peter.  Lock up when you leave,” Bruce said, heading out to drag Tony out of his workshop.

Bruce wasn’t sure how often Tony had been out of the shop this week.  He was working on a new suit, and he was nothing if not persistent about getting finished with it before the next Hydra raid.  Bruce smiles to think about how close Tony and he had gotten; Tony called them “Science Bros” which he thought was amusing and accurate at the same time.  Even though he felt like they were much closer than they had been, he still knew he didn’t even know half of what there was to know about Tony.  He liked Tony a lot, but he couldn’t help it.  Tony liked him, and more than that, he liked the Other Guy, which never ceased to amaze him.  No one liked the Other Guy.  And the Other Guy seemed to like Tony too, which was really beyond him.  And more than that, Tony protected him from Ross and SHIELD, and he had no real idea why.  So he guessed they were friends, and for Bruce that was one very strange feeling.  He was growing closer to the rest of the team as well, even though they were still wary of the Other Guy, and tended to walk on eggshells a bit.  Tony more than made up for it, however, since he obviously refused, even going so far as to building a hulk-proof room that took up two stories and was filled with things for the hulk to smash, including experimental armors that Tony was testing. 

Bruce knocked on the glass door and the face he was looking for looked up and grinned like a child who was playing in a sandbox.  Well, this was Tony’s sandbox, after all.  The door slid open with a whoosh and Bruce couldn’t help but chuckle at the sight.  Tony was always so put together until you caught him in the lab.  He was sitting in a tank top with the distinct glow of the arc reactor in his chest shining through it and a pair of ripped black jeans.  He was wearing a pair of steel toed boots and there was a broad smear of grease across his face.  In his hands he had one of the Iron Man boots and was fiddling with the pieces.

“Hey there, big guy,” Tony said, looking up with a broad grin.  He set the boot down and rubbed more grease on his face.  “I take it its movie time?  Where’s your younger radioactive companion today?” he said, standing up and wiping his hands on his jeans.

“Yup, we’re introducing the blondes to Star Wars,” Bruce said as he watched his friend clean off his hands and face with a somewhat clean rag.  “And if you mean Peter, he’s still up in my lab; he’s engrossed, and said he’s seen the movies, of course.”

“Great, I can’t wait to see Thor’s face when they start talking about the force and shit, and Cap too.  I love watching him get that look on his face when all the references I make click,” Tony said, dropping the rag on to of Dum-E’s head who beeped at him.

The pair headed up and Tony immediately took up the large chair by himself.  He never really sat next to the others.  Bruce had noticed this early on.  He also noticed that he rarely touched anyone and saw the grimace when the man was grabbed or slapped on the back by one of the team.  He was curious, but it had only been a few months.  Since the Hydra raids had begun, they’d really meshed well as a team.  Looking for the “Glowstick of Destiny” as Tony called it had brought them together and to be honest, Bruce was enjoying it quite a bit.  If Tony wanted to explain his behavior he would.  Bruce knew vaguely that he suffered from PTSD from Afghanistan, but he never asked questions about why.  He also knew that he and Natasha were the only two to know even that much about Tony.

“Hey, here, want popcorn?” Clint asked Tony, handing him a bowl. 

Bruce saw the way the man’s eyes widened a bit, staring at the item for a moment and it was so brief, Bruce thought he was mistaken.  It was a slight flicker of fear and revulsion about the thought of taking something from someone else.

“Uh, yeah, sit it down there.  I’ll get it in a minute,” he said, gesturing at the side table beside him, tucking his hands under his armpits as he looked away from the bowl.  Clint shrugged, putting the bowl down, and Tony waited a moment then picked it up.

Bruce scrunched his brow at that as he settled in on the sofa.  Now that he was thinking about these oddities, he couldn’t stop thinking about them.  Natasha this time came in, handing out soda cans, and went to hand one to Tony.  Again he nodded.  “Just put it there, thanks,” he mumbled, and again, immediately picked it up as soon as Natasha had left it.

He watched another moment as he glanced between the two items and returned them to the table, and rubbing his hands on his greasy jeans.  That was a bit weird, he thought to himself.  He’s cleaning off his hands on his dirty jeans.  Then Tony tapped the arm of the chair, and a compartment slid open and he took out a bottle of hand sanitizer and vigorously applied it to his hands without looking, eyes locked on the TV screen.  Bruce figured he’d think more on it later, though as the lights dimmed and JARVIS started the movie.  They were about halfway through the first movie when the screen blanked and all the lights around them went out.  From where they sat, high above the city, it was apparent that it was a complete area blackout.

“JARVIS?” Tony’s voice said from the darkness as everyone’s eyes began to adjust to the moon and starlight filtering in from the windows and the bright blue glow from the arc reactor in Tony’s chest.  “Emergency power, JARVIS,” he said, his voice starting to waver a bit.

“The fuck,” he muttered, standing now.  “JARVIS has three emergency backup generators, so does the tower, the tower isn’t even run on anything attached to the city,” he muttered, moving to the window.  “It’s impossible; it has its own power source, the big arc reactor…”

Just then, the speakers crackled, bringing everyone’s attention to the ceiling.  “Good evening, Avengers,” came a female voice.  “Please, get comfortable.  I’m afraid that your movie was not good enough for my purposes.  Or rather it was too good.  Tony, you are far too comfortable. And I really don’t want you to be comfortable.”

Tony frowned, not recognizing the voice.  His mind was going a million miles an hour trying to put together who from his past would have the capability, will, and intelligence to pull something like this.  Not many people could work around his security.  Not many people in the world could even attempt to shut down his power grid.

“Who are you and what did you do to my tower?” he said, beginning to become more annoyed by the fact that he couldn’t figure out who this was than anything else.

“Tut tut, your tower will be fine.  After we’re done.  You, however, might never be the same.”

Tony looked down to see at least fifteen red dots converge on his arc reactor.  He looked at the team to find each of them in a similar situation in the main room.  He looked up and they only way someone could target them would be from the upper story windows, but this was a taller building than anything in the area.  There was no way possible for this to be happening without some advanced technology that Tony was unaware of at play.

“How? What are…” he muttered as a soft pop sounded and the floor beside him exploded.  He followed the trajectory up to his completely bulletproof windows to see a tiny, perfectly round hole that now had whistling air coming through it.

“Sit down, Tony.  Please.  This should be fun.  I ran across these when going through the wreckage of my husband’s bunker.  You remember my husband, don’t you?  You killed him after all,” she said, her voice taking a harder edge as Tony sunk into his chair, frowning.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Tony said.  “The whole Merchant of Death thing, lots of people on that list, honey,” he said, his tone flippant, but Bruce could hear an undertone of extreme discomfort in those words.

He caught the looks of the others at the title.  “Yes, Merchant of Death, rather a good title for you, isn’t it?  Now you try and make up for it, don’t you, with that pretty piece of machinery?”

Tony’s face was set into a hard mask.  “I don’t know what you’re on about, but you best not hurt JARVIS or I’ll personally make your life miserable.”

“Oh, here we are, the first one.  I’m sure you’ll realize who I am in just a moment, or at least who I used to be,” she said, as suddenly the TV screen flickered in front of them and a few lights came on slowly.  The red dots didn’t disappear from any of their chests however.

Tony, as in control as he was, froze when the voice spoke and a scroll of translations appeared at the bottom of the screen.

“What are you doing with the camera?  Move out of the way,” an accented voice said and the camera went from blackness to a dimly lit cave.

“Raza wants it filmed.  Just in case, he wants to make sure you don’t kill him on purpose, we need him alive,” the other voice spoke up, deeper, as the translation scrolled over the screen.

“Well, you should have thought about that before you let him have a bomb explode in his face, now move it!” the first voice said, again as they saw a steel table and a body that was very still.

“You’ll die if he dies, Yinsen, so you better save his life,” the behind the camera voice again.

“Dammit!  His chest is full of shrapnel, do you have any drugs?” he yelled.

“Nope, you’re looking at what we have.  Maybe some ether here somewhere, I’ll send someone to look.”  Even though the language was different, everyone could hear the lack of concern in the voice, and the almost flippant attitude they had.

They saw a figure, a demure looking man with balding gray hair, hovering over the body that was starting to groan.  They saw him rip open the shirt, and the man picked up a scalpel.  Several other men were moving around and clearing the area.  It was obvious they were in a rush to do something about the man dying on the table. The camera moved and they all gasped to see the familiar face of none other than Tony Stark as the camera panned up for a moment, his eyes open and glassy, then back to his chest that was a bloody mess.  They glanced at Tony who was pale, his hands shaking.  Yinsen began to slice into his chest causing the body to thrash.

“Either tie him down or hold him down, otherwise, this is going to kill him,” he said frowning at the cameraman.  The man sat the camera down and after a while picked it up, having restrained Tony’s arms and legs.  The other men buzzed around repeatedly, words in languages that the others didn’t know.  Natasha understood some of them, of course.  Whoever had made the video had not translated the chatter around the room for the viewers of this video.

There pained sounds as Yinsen cleared out chunks of metal.  Then he sighed.  “He’s going to die, I can’t help it.  I can’t remove all the shrapnel.  It will hit his heart soon, nothing can be done,” Yinsen said.  “He’s one of the walking dead.  There is no way to stop it at this point.”

“Save him,” came another voice, and the camera panned to a man in the doorway.  “I need him alive.”

“Raza, there’s no…” he began.

“You’ll die, and I’ll bomb your entire village if he dies.”

Yinsen looked down with a concerned face and looked to be wondering exactly what he was going to do.  “Okay, bring me a few things, I have an idea,” he said, glancing at the body on the table.  “I don’t know how long he’ll live, but he’ll live perhaps a few days more.  If he survives what I’m going to do.”

The camera clicked off and then back on to show Tony’s body even more restrained.  “Okay, that should work.  Give me the bone saw,” he said, and someone handed him something.  They could hear Tony’s voice muttering in the background incoherently.

Bruce’s eyes went wide.  He’d done things in the jungles and the back rooms of houses in third world countries, but never something tantamount to open heart surgery.  Removing the shrapnel from his chest, that was one thing, but to crack his entire chest open to get to his heart was another. “Tony…they put that thing in you…with no…while you were awake…”

Tony was beyond pale and nearly hyperventilating, breath coming in gasps and pants as he held his hand to his glowing chest.  He had thought he was okay with what had happened.  He had thought that he was wouldn’t have a problem just watching what had happened.  He had never been so wrong about something in his life.  To know what they had done, even to have memories of the agony and the pain of what they had done, that was one thing.  To actually see, and relive, the entire thing…  The others saw it and realized to their horror what they were about to witness.

The image shifted to the man, Yinsen, beginning to cut open Tony’s chest in a way that was a lot like an open-heart surgery.  Around him, men seemed to come into and out of the camera area.  Then they heard Tony screaming against the leather that had been put in his teeth, but it wasn’t loud enough to cover the sound of cracking bones as the man lifted out his sternum and began cutting away bone, muscle and tissue around Tony’s heart.  He implanted the metal casing, the magnet and hooked up a car battery to it, despite the agony his patient was experiencing. The sounds were nearly unbearable to those that sat stock-still.

“I couldn’t pass out, I don’t know why; I wanted to pass out so much…” Tony muttered, eyes wide.  “How could I not pass out…?”  Tony’s face had gone pale as everything that woke him up in the middle of life was being played with vivid clarity. 

The team watched in a semblance of relief as Tony’s body seemed to go slack as a rag was placed over his face; finally, as the man working on him began to stitch up the gaping cavity he’d created in his chest.  Finally, he was done and sighed. 

“So, what’d you do?” the cameraman spoke from behind the still running camera.

“If he survives the shock and blood loss, he’ll live for a week, maybe.  I put an electro magnet in his chest to keep the shrapnel from reaching his heart.  Hopefully long enough for whatever Raza wants him to do.”  Yinsen sighed deeply.  “Long enough that my home survives.”

The camera switched off and back on, this time another room.

“The sadistic bastard just wants to watch it again, that’s why he had me film the surgery.  He gets off on that shit, I think,” a familiar voice speaking in the background as the words scrolled across the screen. 

“No surprise he wants this part filmed, huh?  How long before he breaks?” another voice.

“He’s a civilian.  Ten minutes.”

There was a snort.  “I’m not sure.  He just had half his chest ripped out while he was awake.  Obviously he’s got some metal in there somewhere.”

A third voice spoke up.  “Hah, there’s metal in his heart now!”  There was a round of laughter at Tony’s expense.

“He’s weak now.  And I’ve seen trained men crumble pretty damn quickly from this.”

“But he knows we can’t kill him, or we lose the chance at having the missile made.”

There was a bang as a door opened and they watched as Tony was dragged into the room, desperately holding a car battery to his chest.  He frowned at the large barrel of ice water in the middle of the room.

Words were exchanged around him as he was brought in a language he obviously couldn’t understand.  They had decided to not translate this banter, apparently.  Then it began in earnest, and everyone understood why there was no standing water in the tower, and why Tony refused to use the multitude of pools he had in various places.  The wires sparked and shocked and his body thrashed and was still, brought up just before death.  Eventually, he came up coughing water and it felt like needles from the cold. It went on and on, and there around him, they heard laughter and it stopped when he was barely conscious. The screen faded.

“Tony…” Bruce said just as everyone began to slump in their seats.  He frowned, feeling the heady rush of some sort of gas before he too slumped over in his seat.

Steve came to consciousness before anyone else, thanks to the super soldier serum.  He groaned, a headache ebbing away behind his eyes.  He blinked and looked around to see the others still passed out.  There was an insistent beeping from the table beside him.  He looked and saw a green button he had never really seen before. He wasn’t thinking and pushed it.  There was a loud pop and whir sound.

“Captain Rogers, thank you for reactivating my programing,” JAVIS said in his usual calm tone.  All around them, the lights began to come back up as JAVIS powered the tower back to full capacity.

Steve blinked wearily.  “What happened?”

“There was an internal security breech that shut down the conduits from the arc reactor for the building.  I am currently unsure of how, most security footage has been magnetically wiped from my hard drive.”

There was another groan as he looked to see both Bruce and Thor roll their heads and groan.  “Where did the bus come from?” quipped Clint as he struggled to a seated position.

“Sirs, I have Director Fury on the line.”

“Put him through,” Steve said, rubbing his face with both hands.

“Goddammit, where the fuck have you been?  I’ve been trying to contact you for the last six hours!” Fury yelled.

“Please, no yelling,” Steve groaned.  He looked around.  “Oh no.”

“What is happening over there?  I’ve brought the helicarrier, we’re hovering over the tower now,” Fury snapped.

“Tony’s gone,” Steve said, struggling to his feet.  “He’s been kidnapped.”

  



	2. Scramble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is in complete rewrite.

Before long, everyone was in the conference room on the new helicarrier, having explained to the director what happened.  Thankfully, despite being the entire power grid going down, the backup cameras in the tower that ran on individual power cells were able to capture what had happened.  Fury soon found that he, too, had been sent the videos that they had been forced to watch.  The team waited in an unnatural silence for Fury to come back.  Would Fury be angry?  Would he be indifferent?  None of them knew how to anticipate what the Director of SHIELD would do about Tony Stark. 

After taking the time to review them, Fury joined the others in the conference room.

“I’ve gotten caught up on the situation.  It seems that ‘Anna’ made sure to send me the videos that you were shown.  I’m not sure what her game is, since it isn’t like we weren’t aware of what had occurred to Tony.  Though I’m not sure I understood the severity of what he went through until now,” Fury said, sitting slowly and scanning the room.

“I didn’t know about this,” Steve said, looking at the others.  He wore and expression that was a mix between worry, fear, and confusion.  “Why didn’t I know about this?  I’m supposed to be the team leader, why didn’t I know?”

Natasha sighed, chewing her lip thoughtfully for a second.  “I knew some about Afghanistan, but not everything.   Tony tends to clear his file on a regular basis.  I was aware of some of the things that have happened since then, but I suppose I did not consider how…traumatic…it was for him.”

Fury nodded.  “What little he said when he got back amounted to that he was held for three months, and as you saw ended up getting the thing put in his chest in a cave.  It was a sheer miracle he didn’t die from it as infection alone in those conditions could have been deadly let alone shock from the procedure itself.  Then he built the arc reactor and the first suit; he called it the mark I.  He killed everything when he blasted his way out, destroying all his weapons in the process.”

Bruce nodded.  “He said when he got back, he stopped weapons production immediately.  He was mortified to see his weapons in the hands of the people they were meant to be fighting against.  Then to find out it was his mentor and friend the entire time working with the enemy.”

Steve nodded.  “I can see why he doesn’t make weapons anymore.  Having one of your own blow up in your face does that. But what he said about Howard, was that true? He really had that philosophy?”

Natasha sighed. “I think he must have changed from when you knew him, Steve.  I can’t tell you how, exactly, but I know that Tony and him didn’t have the best relationship.”

Behind them, the door opened.  “Sir, we have an incoming video transmission, they’re claiming to be the ones who have Tony,” Maria Hill said in a rushed voice from the doorway.

Fury nodded, turning around toward the screen that sat displayed on the wall behind him, and nodded.  “Put it through.”

The screen flickered to life reviewing a woman.  She appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent and wore a dark colored headscarf that obscured all but her face.  Dark eyes stared back at them with a hard and undeniably malicious look.  She smiled at the camera.

“Good day, Avengers.  I assume you’re curious as to what I’m doing.  We’ll just call me Anna, shall we?” she said.

The room she was in looked bare, plain taupe walls and nothing else could be seen.  “What do you want with Tony?”  
            She smiled.  “Simple, revenge, my departed husband was a member of the Ten Rings.  He burned my husband, now I will burn him.  Fitting for the Merchant of Death.”

Fury narrowed his eyes at her.  “If this was simply revenge you wouldn’t be calling us now.  You would have killed him and dumped his body somewhere already.  What is your game?”

She grinned.  “Oh, of course, of course.  You see, I like to play games.  Chess is my favorite pastime, and you know, it just isn’t fun to play alone.  So you see, I’ve captured the King.  We all know that the Queen is the important piece. Now, what will your move be, Director, dear Knight, I wonder?  See I don’t think you understand how pathetic your Tony Stark, your pathetic king, is.  And I intend to take you to a point where you will see he doesn’t deserve what little loyalty you place in him.  I intend to show you how broken he already is, and why he is worthless and so not worth the time you will take to locate him.  And when you don’t come, then he will understand.  And I’ll let him end his own miserable existence.”

The team simply stared at the screen for a long moment.  Bruce glanced over to see Steve’s eyes widen at the thought she was going to somehow convince Tony to kill himself.  Bruce knew that Steve had no idea that that would be so much easier to do than he could imagine.  Bruce, and possibly Natasha, knew that it would only take the slightest push to send Tony over that edge because the path was well worn.  Tony had been to the edge and back, and though no one really knew all the reasons why, they knew that the possibility was there.

“What do you mean?  Tony’s our friend and we will find him no matter what you do,” Steve said with a determined frown.  Clint glanced over at Steve and hid a smirk. Friend, huh, he thought to himself.  Usually Steve referred to him as a teammate.  Not a friend.

“Oh yes, Captain, I figured as much from you.  But you, above all, will be most disgusted with this poor excuse for a human.  After all, he should be more like his father, shouldn’t he?” Anna said, and stepped back, where they saw Tony was sitting tied to a chair behind her.  He was obviously unconscious, but as of yet unharmed.  “You know, having him hear after all I’ve gone through to get him here is so very sweet.  It makes me want to take my time, a good long time, and make him appreciate the work I’ve put into finding him.”

“Tony!” Clint shouted.

“Oh, he’s drugged enough to drop an elephant.  Of course, it wouldn’t have been necessary if his resistance to drugs wasn’t so high.  Of course, you knew about that right?  It used to be more than alcohol,” she said with a grin, walking over to lift Tony’s head up easily.  “So I just gave him a little reminder of what it was like before that last trip through rehab.”

Fury was the first to speak again after everyone let that sentence sink in for a moment.  “You need to return Stark to us.  He will be brought home, no matter what you think; no matter what you do.  I’m well aware of his past problems and drug abuse.  What you have to say about this is nothing new to me.  You honestly think anything you say is going to surprise me?  I know everything about everyone on this team.”

“Oh, that’s where you are wrong.  Not even you know the depths of depravity your little playboy has gone to over the years.  Now, be good little pawns and stay right there.  If I call again and any one of you isn’t there,” she pulled a gun from under her shirt and put it to Tony’s head.  “If any of you leave, he will die; no game.  It’s only fun when everyone’s present when you air the dirty laundry.”

The line cut off leaving them stunned.  Bruce found that everyone was staring at him, including Fury.  Bruce did think it was quite amusing though, because Fury had played the straight part well by acting like he knew everything about Tony when it was obvious he didn’t know much more than anyone else.

“What?”  
            “Tony trusts you most, what is she talking about? What is so terrible she thinks we’d abandon him?” Steve asked, glancing over at Fury to see if he was going to say anything.  He didn’t.

Bruce shook his head.  “I knew about the drug addiction, it happened after he was out of MIT before he took over the company when he was 21.  It was hard few years.  I mean, he was seventeen when he graduated MIT and lost his parents.”

“He was what?” Clint said staring at him and back to Fury.

Fury nodded.  He pulled up a file on his computer that appeared on the large monitor behind him.  “Yeah, he was fourteen when he started MIT, and seventeen when he graduated summa cum laude.”

“I am unsure that significance,” Thor said, face crinkled in a frown.

“It means ‘with highest honors’, meaning Tony practically did perfectly on everything he did,” Bruce supplied.  “I’m considered a genius, but even I can’t imagine doing what he did.  I’ve seen him in the lab, and he literally processes things faster than the computer.   I’ve never known anyone that could do that.  He does calculations in his head that I can’t even begin to do without the computer. I suspect he’s also eidetic, er photographic is the colloquial term, in memory as well. Cap, I know you get mad because he doesn’t follow orders, but you have to understand, his brain processes things so fast that sometimes I wonder if he even has time to speak sometimes before he puts it in action.”

Steve nodded slowly.  “So he really is a prodigy…I imagine Howard was proud of him…”

There was a snort from Natasha, to which Steve turned and frowned.  “From what little I’ve gathered, that was not the case at all.”

“Sir, transmission incoming again,” Maria called from the adjoining room where she and the other team were working to trace the transmission.

They all turned as the woman, Anna, filled up the screen again.  “There, you see I can’t let you trace my transmission that easily, now can I?”

Fury glanced at Hill who shook her head.  He almost, not quite but almost, growled in frustration.  “What is it this time?”

“Tell you the rules of the game, of course.  First, if you aren’t together when I call I shoot him.  Second, if you interrupt the signal, I shoot him.  Third, any one of you attempts to call someone else in to help, I shoot him.  This will play out in its entirety, then, you get to make your choice.  I’ll leave Stark at this location, of course, it will be a race against time before he finishes himself.  And if you want him, you can try and get him, if not, you can let his life end.  Of course, he’ll have the tools available to end himself, so we’ll see who has the strongest will.”

There was a quiet that descended on the room around them.  “Oh, and you get to watch me break him too.  I’m sure he’ll be mortified to know you can see it.  And break him I will.  I saw how he reacted to his little surgery reenactment.  And his lovely fear of water.  Who can blame him?  So of course, we have a lovely barrel of water prepared for when he wakes up.  That should loosen his tongue.  Because, oh, didn’t I tell you?  He’s going to tell you his secrets all on his own.  He’s going to reveal his depravity and disgust.”

“You are doing the wrong thing, Anna, or whatever your real name is,” Fury said.  “SHIELD will discover you.  I’ve already told you nothing you tell us is going to be a surprise.”

“Oh you can try.  Go ahead, it isn’t against the rules.  The Avengers must stay put, but your other agents are free to do whatever they can.  You just can’t call in any other outside help.  So don’t think I am not aware of the Reed Richards’ team, or any number of others in the New York like that Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, or that web slinger.  So SHIELD can have a good time attempting to find me,” she said with a grin.  “I’ll call back when sleeping beauty wakes up.  I might have slipped him a little too much after all.  Stay put, my pawns,” she said as the screen flickered and the image was replaced by the blank blue background.

Silence enveloped the room.  Tony was their friend.  They would not abandon him, no matter what.  Especially not to some crazy widow who wanted to ruin Tony in the eyes of the Avengers and SHIELD.  At least, that’s what thoughts ran through Steve’s mind.  He couldn’t believe what Tony had gone through.  He couldn’t imagine what pain he lived with today.  Tony wasn’t a soldier, but he had endured torture that would have broken many of the best soldiers Steve knew.

Thor looked up suddenly.  “I have an idea.”

Everyone gaped at him.  Thor was never one to come up with plans.  “What do you mean?” Fury said, looking up from the tablet he was doing something clandestine on.

“I know who might be able to help us, someone this woman cannot track, or even recognize as someone we called for help,” he said thoughtfully.

“Who would that be?”  Bruce said, frowning, already knowing the answer but not know why Thor would suggest something so out there.

“My brother,” Thor said, still unfocused in thought.

There was a silence as everyone stared at him.  “Loki?  Isn’t he locked up in Asgard?  And why would you even think that, he practically destroyed New York?” Clint finally said, anger flashing bright in his eyes.  Tony was in enough trouble already, and he did not have fond memories of being under mind control.

Thor sighed.  “There were…circumstances.  It seems that my brother wasn’t entirely under his own control.  Over the last three months, they’ve broken whatever control whoever had him in the void had on him.  It was similar to the way he put others like Friend Clint under control, except he had been brainwashed to believe he was not under someone else’s control.  Father informed me with the last week that Loki has become more himself and his previous ideas of conquest are completely gone, according to my father, and he has been allowed to roam the castle freely again.  He is still very angry with the All-Father about the lies he was told, but he has accepted what was done to him.”

“What was done to him?” Clint asked, frowning, really having trouble with the idea that the person that had subjugated him was under the same influence he had been.

Thor sighed.  “He fell from the Bifrost, and into the void.  It was there he was captured.  We are unsure exactly what was done, but it can be assumed some form of torture and magic was used to alter him so drastically.  My brother has never been a ‘good’ person, but he was never so bent on wanton destruction.”

“So what does this mean for Tony?” Bruce asked.

“I’ll ask the All-Father to allow him to Midgard under my guidance.  But we cannot allow Anna to see or hear that he is here for us.  We must allow my brother to use his skills as he sees fit.  Which means that we must not believe what we see.  My brother is a trickster, and if I request his help, assuming he agrees, he may use his status as Tony’s enemy to his advantage,” he said seriously.

Clint nodded thoughtfully.  “So he would appear to ally with this woman in order to save him.”

Thor nodded.  He stood and stepped outside the room for a while, the others assumed to commune or whatever Thor did when he wanted to talk with Odin or someone else from Asgard.  A few moments later he returned grinning like a big blonde idiot, making the others smile.  Sometimes, Thor was the most dangerous one in the room.  The rest of the time he was like a fluffy blonde teddy bear.

“Father…” he began but was cut off by a flash of green beside him.

Loki stood beside him in his leather armor, but thankfully without the abhorrent helmet.  He looked quite disinterested in anything as he glanced at his black painted nails, one hand behind his back.

“Father said you wished my help, Thor,” he said, not even looking at the others in the room.  “He indicated my restrictions on travel might be lifted if I performed admirably.”

“Brother!” Thor announced and grabbed the slender god in his arms in a hug.  Loki rolled his eyes expressively but did not fight him as he was squeezed.

“Thor, I cannot do whatever it is that you want me to do if you do not release me.”

Thor released him and grinned at the others while Loki rolled his eyes again.  “What is it; I was researching the void when I was so rudely interrupted.”

Thor nodded.  “Friend Tony has been kidnapped, and we would like your help in rescuing him.”

Loki arched one black brow.  “The Man of Iron?  Hum, well, I must have a location to be able to do that, Thor.  I can’t simply appear wherever he is, it doesn’t work like that.  If I have a known location, I can get in and out with him with relative ease unless there is something blocking my magic.  Who has taken him?”

“As far as we know, it is a terrorist organization entirely of Earth origin,” Fury said, staring at the god with a wary eye.

“Then it should be easy enough, provided you can find him.”

“We haven’t yet, but the next time she contacts us, we may have a complete trace.  But she cannot see you, we’ve been instructed that only SHIELD can be involved, and no outside help can be called,” Bruce said, his eyes slightly green, and it was obvious he was holding back the Other Guy.  Being in the same room with Loki was difficult.  However, if he provided an avenue to rescue Tony…

“Easy enough,” Loki said, and his body shimmered golden green for a moment and he looked like a generic SHIELD Agent.  He was shorter, and had short curly blond hair and bright blue eyes. “Sufficient?”

Everyone nodded, impressed again by his ability to change his appearance.  This time, though, he changed more than his clothing.  “An illusion?” asked Natasha.

“No, I am a master shape shifter, so I have entirely altered my shape.  Others who may be able to see past illusion will not be able to see anything more than what you see,” Loki said with a quirk of a now blond brow.

And now, they would wait.


	3. Breaking Point

Everyone has a breaking point.  Tony Stark would certainly be no different.  He was stubborn though, and full of fierce determination when he wanted to be.  So finding that breaking point was going to be difficult, and thus far, no one had found it.  However, as he floated to consciousness from a drug induced stupor and stared into the eyes of the woman who had captured him, he was quite certain that he might find out where that breaking point was this time around.  It was certain on the woman’s face.  There was little doubt to Tony that this was different, because this was personal, this wasn’t to get him to use his mind or his hands.  No, this was all about causing him the most pain.  There is a difference between someone trying to manipulate a person into doing something for them and this.  This, Tony knew, he might not survive.

Tony felt the world waver and come into existence around him as he heard Anna’s voice from a distance away.  It pulled him up from the depths of his sleep.

“Wakey, wakey, Mr. Stark,” she said in a singsong voice. 

He was impressed at the nearly perfect American accent this woman had perfected.  It was very rare to find someone that could mold their voice into other languages so well.  “I’ve set the board for our game.  Your _friends_ have been informed of the rules of our little game, so now, we begin.  What you need to know is that you will cooperate.  If you don’t, you won’t be the only one to suffer, though suffer you will anyway.”

She gestured to the barrel beside him and his shoulders tensed but his face betrayed none of his rising fear.  “What do you mean, princess?” he said, trying to hold his voice as steady as he could.

She smiled.  “Oh, you see, I’ve got a friend of yours.  A couple actually.  Well three.  It wasn’t hard.”

She gestured to a set of monitors.  For the first time, Tony took in the room.  The walls were taupe, covered in paint, and the room was dry, so not underground this time.  There were no sounds so probably soundproof.  The floor was plain wood, and the ceiling was that blow on stuff you see everywhere.  He was stripped to his pants, his shoes gone and his tank missing.  On the monitors were three scenes.  One was a picture of Happy and Pepper inside Happy’s home having dinner.  Despite himself he felt his heart clench, knowing that Pepper had found someone much more reliable in Happy.  Another screen showed the inside of Pepper’s apartment.  The third one showed Rhodey sitting on the couch in his place.  He breathed out, because at least they weren’t captured.

“Now, if you can’t guess, I have men on all three locations.  And one wrong move by you, or refusal to cooperate, the snipers will end them.  You remember my snipers, don’t you, Stark?” she said, kneeling in front of him.  He grit his teeth together and couldn’t help himself. 

“What do you want from me?  Money, you can have as much as you want, but if you think I’m giving you any tech, it doesn’t matter what you do to me I can’t do that, princess.”  He was trying very hard to spin this in any way except where it was going.   

She merely grinned.  “No, no, nothing like that.”

She turned behind her and clicked and a larger monitor popped on for a moment showing static that resolved into a familiar conference room on the helicarrier.  The rest of the Avengers sat around the table with Fury and another blonde SHIELD agent.  Tony grinned his best grin at them.  Even to him, though, it felt fake.

“Guys, hey, looks like it’s a party, huh?  I don’t have any scotch so I’m a little disappointed…” Tony said, grin still in place.

“Tony, are you okay?” Bruce said from the other side of the table.

“Peachy, Brucie, just peachy.  Except this whole bitch who kidnapped me without any scotch,” he said, glaring at her.

She only grinned and tapped a couple buttons.  He glanced beside him to see a door that had been blended into the wall open and shut.  Beyond, he only glanced at a similarly blank hallway.  Two men that he could only describe as goons entered.

“First, a little demonstration.  Come now, dunk him,” she said, her eyes going cold.

Tony’s eyes betrayed the fear that passed through him.  He knew what this would feel like and he couldn’t panic, that was the worst, instead he started sucking in deep breaths, trying to oxygenate his blood as much as he could.  He didn’t want to suck that burning cold water down into his lungs, nope, not at all.  The two men yanked him from the chair to kneel in front of the water.  He started shaking, he couldn’t help it.  His mind kept flashing back to the last time this had happened.  He could see chunks of ice floating in it.

“No, come on, I’m not really in the mood for a bath, thanks, I prefer showers…” Tony said, trying desperately to hide the waver in his voice.

“Oh, Tony, don’t worry, they’ll be gentle.  Or, no, they won’t.”

With that, the two men over him shoved his head under the water.  He thrashed at first, panic threatening to overtake him.  Then his mind cleared and he thought it through. Two minutes, he could hold his breath two minutes, and before that he’d go limp.  They didn’t want him to die, not yet.  He thrashed then let his body go slack, and within moments was pulled up gasping and shoved back under a spare breath later.  The first one was the easiest, the ones afterward were harder.  He wasn’t sure how many times, but then, it seemed they realized his trick, and he was dumped under and a hard punch applied to his ribs, which of course made him suck in a breath, and fill his lungs with the ice water. 

They yanked him up by the hair as water came pouring out of his mouth and nose, sending him coughing for a moment before he was dunked again, this time the water edging into his lungs like knives as another punch (that was really not necessary by this point) to his side sent him gulping.  The edges of his vision were going black this time when he was pulled up, and it seemed his tormentor noticed as he weakly coughed the water out of his lungs which were on fire by this point.  He vaguely heard his team in the distance, but the black spots were dancing in a seductive way in front of his eyes, offering a sweet relief of the encompassing blackness.

Then he felt he was dropped into the chair and felt a pinch in his arm.  He looked down to see a needle being pulled out.  He frowned, swaying backward and looked up at the woman who put the needle down on a metal tray beside her.  “Just a little amphetamine, Mr. Stark.  Don’t want you going to sleep now do we?”

“You can’t give him that!” Bruce yelled from across the table, green rippling over his skin.  “His heart cannot take that sort of thing!”

The reaction was instant, the stimulant hit him and his eyes went wide.  He was generally hopped up on caffeine, so the feeling wasn’t too extreme, but the dosage had been really high.  Much higher than his daily stream of coffee and espresso. 

“Shit...” he muttered, blinking as he coughed again, his hands starting to tremble.

She smiled.  “Ah, just as I thought.  Didn’t even phase you as much as it should have, you really messed up on drugs, huh, Tony-boy.”

He glared at her.  “I never took stimulants, princess.  Like I need my brain working any faster than it already does.”

She smiled.  “Well, why don’t you tell me what you did take?”

Tony locked his jaw and turned away, still heaving breaths.  His chest burned and he felt like he couldn’t get enough air still.  She walked toward him and slapped him, sending his head the opposite direction.  “Remember, Tony, you don’t cooperate, those snipers get to have a field day.”

“What snipers?” called Fury.

She smiled back.  “A little insurance and Tony here knows better than to say anything, don’t you?”

Tony glared at her.  “Fuck you,” he muttered, getting a cracking hit to the back of his head with what felt like a pistol butt.  He leaned forward blinking as the world swayed in front of him.

“Language, now answer.  Tell me about your drug addictions.  And your friends over there.”

Tony’s jaw worked.  “I don’t get why you want to know.  I did heroine, morphine and other opiates and lots of weed.  The only things that could slow my brain down.  Now I stick to drinking myself into oblivion.  Hence the lack of stimulants.  I don’t need my goddamned brain working overtime.  Nothing you can’t look up if you really wanted to do so.  Even I haven’t erased all those records.  There’s this thing, called Google, wonderful thing, really, just type in my name and drugs and poof, tons of stuff comes up.”

“Why, dear Tony, do you need to slow your brain down?” she asked, and both the Avengers and Tony caught the genuine interest.  “Why would you dull your senses?”

“Because I think hundreds of different things at a time, goddammit.  I can’t shut it off.  I run variables, equations, solve problems, three or four at a time, sometimes more.  There’s no stopping it.  It streams in and around and hurts sometimes.  Is that what you want to know?  That I can’t stop my brain? Because that’s it.  That’s why I spend days without sleeping, because it just keeps going.  Sometimes the only way to come down is to knock myself out, either from sheer exhaustion, or a bottle of scotch, and it used to be drugs to shut it off.  I don’t take any narcotics now for that reason.  Is that it?  Is that what you damn well want out of me?” he said, jaw still clenched tightly.

She grinned.  “Thanks, Tony.  Now while I have a chat with your friends, let’s see if we can’t get you even more cooperative.  Boys, take him and have a little fun on your own, you know, like we talked about before.  Show him who is the one in charge, humiliate and degrade him, please.  Whatever you want to do with him, just don’t kill him before you bring him back.”

One of the men leaned over and whispered into Tony’s ear then.  The Avengers couldn’t hear it but Tony jerked away from him with wide eyes and started to struggle immediately, breath coming hard and heavy.  “Fuck you, bitch, I’m going to fucking kill you!  Goddammit, let me go!” he screamed as he was dragged out of doorway, leaving her grinning at them.  No one could miss the slightly hysterical tone to his voice as it rose several octaves.

“Where are you taking him?  You said you weren’t going to kill him!”  Bruce said, his muscles starting to bulge green around his neck and shoulders.

She graced them with a smile.  “No, I won’t kill him.  But I am going to make him want to kill himself, you remember that, right?  Make him broken before you can find him.  My boys won’t damage him…much.  They’ve been dying to get Tony alone ever since their brothers died in that little escape he made.  He’s just lucky they prefer privacy.  Well semi-privacy, I have to video tape it, but I’ll let you wonder what happens first.  It is so much more fun that way.”

No one in the room missed the implication of what she said.  “What…you wouldn’t…” Steve said, deep frown creasing his brows.

“Oh I would, or rather, they are.  You’ve been in war zones, Captain.  You know what happens to prisoners of war.  You know that a little water and drugs are good fun and all, but there are several ways to break a man.  Some of them are more effective than others.  Now, I’ll get back to you when Tony’s all finished up with his new friends.  Then we’ll see how talkative he is,” she said with a wicked smile.

The screen went dark as she disconnected and smiled as she brought up another closed caption screen.  She wondered if she should transmit it right away.  She smiled, thinking she’d wait, as she recorded the next room with a smirk set firmly onto her face.  She’d let them wonder and speculate on what she’d said. 

_“I’ve got plans for you, playboy. Now’s our turn to have a little fun…”_

Those words were quite plain to Tony when they were uttered.  He was sure that he would have a heart attack or pass out if it weren’t for the stimulants the woman pumped into him.  His arms were still bound, but his legs were free so he kicked and fought them as they drug him through the first door and then the other.  He struggled despite the threat of snipers on his closest friends as they drug him out and into the next room, tossing him carelessly to the floor.  He fell face down but rolled to his back and tried to kick out at the one closest.

He smiled when Tony kicked his shin and the reacted, stomping down on his ankle.   Tony felt a numbing crack and pain shot up his calf into his thigh.  His eyes went wide and he looked down to see his foot turned at an angle it really shouldn’t be turned.  No doubt the heavy boots this goon was wearing had helped do damage to him.

“No running off or kicking with that, playboy,” one of them men growled walking around him as Tony struggled to his knees, his hands handcuffed behind his back still.  He watched them, lungs still burning and swallowed.  He tried to ignore the pain when he moved. 

“My little brother was a good kid, you know.  Only fifteen,” the first one said, who Tony dubbed Thing 1 in his head.  He named the other Thing 2.  The only difference besides facial features was Thing 1 was broader and had on a red colored shirt.  Thing 1 wore a yellowish shirt.

“And my older brother raised me.  I certainly wasn’t happy to find out he was dead, thanks to you, Mr. Stark,” Thing 2 said. 

Tony could hear the pure malice in both their voices.  He had been right when he’d realized that this wasn’t going to be about getting something out of him.  This was pure and simple torture for the sake of causing him pain. 

Tony knew this was going to end badly, so the least he could do was save some of his pride.  “Well, if I hadn’t been kidnapped in the first place, nobody would have died, so you totally should blame their dead boss, so you know, maybe kill yourselves and go beat him up in the afterlife instead of bothering me,” Tony said, trying to keep the rising panic out of his voice.

The statement was met with a stinging pain of some kind of whip across his back, causing him to hiss in pain.  He’d lost the sight of Thing 1 while Thing 2 had advanced on him from the front.  Maybe he was wrong and these guys were just going to beat him near to death.  Okay, he could handle that.  After a while, his back felt like there was a fire burning across it and he could barely hold himself upright.  After the fifth or sixth lash, he couldn’t hold back his voice anymore and he fell forward. Then, by the twentieth, his voice was raw and hoarse and his breathing nothing more than gasps.

“Enough,” Thing 1 said.  “Don’t want him passing out before we start our fun.”

Tony felt his body pulled up and leaned back against the infernally plain, smooth wall.  He looked up through watery eyes at the two of them standing over him glaring. 

Tony snorted.  “What, you’re not having fun yet?  Beating someone with a whip isn’t fun enough for you?  I’d hate to see you guys at a party, you must be the biggest downer there…”

Thing 1 smirked.  “You’d know all about the fun you can have at parties, don’t you, Tony?”

Tony blinked the words connecting for a moment before he snarled.  “Yeah, booze, talk, booze, talk, that’s about the measure of it.  You two would be big party crashers.”

“I think he’s playing us, like he doesn’t know what we’re talking about,” Thing 2 said to Thing 1 with a thinly veiled snarl on his face.

Thing 1 nodded.  “So, Stark, what did they do first?  Push your face down?  Or did they strip you naked before they started in?  Or did they leave your clothes on?”

Tony blinked at him, and shook his head.  “What…what are you talking about…” he muttered, his mind descending to a place he didn’t want it to go.

“When they got you at the party, how long before you realized what they were gonna do?  Did you even understand before they filled you full of cock?  Did you know that they were going to strip you of your manhood before you were even a man?  To be so humiliated, no wonder you wanted to blow up things.  You had no manhood left, to be thrown down and raped like a worthless woman.  To let yourself be violated like that what a weak, insignificant insect you are.  Do you know there is no greater shame for a man?” Thing 2 said, smiling at him.

Tony was frozen with something kin to fright and horror.  How did they know this?  Where did they find out about it?  “No, stop.  That’s not it.”

“Oh yes it is,” thing 1 said, smirking now.  “We saw what happened.  We saw that you were made less than the dirt upon a woman’s shoe because there is nothing lower than a man that lets himself be subjected to such things.”

Tony shook his head now, fury mixing with revulsion in his throat.  “I wasn’t even sixteen!  There were too many of them!  I didn’t let them do anything!”

“You are a man the moment you can lift a weapon, so you were a man,” Thing 2.  “You should have fought them.  You shouldn’t have been there.  You are not a man.  You even tried to take your life.  It would have been a kindness, however, if you had succeeded.  To live each day with such shame, the same of being treated like a whore, to have that manhood taken like that.  Yes, you are no longer a man.  You need to be reminded, however, that you are not one.”

Tony gulped back a strange noise that threatened to rise in his throat, somewhere between a scream and a moan.  Oh hell, he thought as they both advanced on him, throwing him over onto his back and staring at him with eyes that he did not like at all.  He scrambled, pushing with his one unbroken foot to go…where?  There was nowhere to go.  He glanced back and forth between them.

“What, no witty words now, playboy?” Thing 2 said, grabbing him by the broken ankle, getting a scream out of him as he was pulled roughly toward him, the floor rubbing painfully against the broken skin of his back, and he was pretty sure his wrists were broken by now from landing on them awkwardly.

“No,” he said, sounding pitiful to his own ears.  “No, don’t…anything else…” he moaned as he tried desperately to pass out, bashing his own head backward into the floor, only to have it held by Thing 1. 

“No, none of that,” Thing 1 said, holding his head in a vice grip as Thing 2’s hands made quick work of his clothes.  “It isn’t any fun if you don’t scream.”

Tony had lost his ability to reason, let alone speak, as they viciously attacked him again and again.  One, then both, would take their time and talk the entire time about what shame and disgrace this was.  He felt like he was coming unbound at the seams as they took every advantage of him as they could.  He started sliding into numbness again.  It was cold, alone, and it was safer. 

The room, like the other, was soundproof, so not even his tormentor Anna heard his screams.  But she sat, a wide smile on her face as her two most loyal men took all their pent up aggression on the man they both were sure caused their brothers’ deaths.  There were so many ways to break a man, it was true.  But sometimes you had to manipulate and lie to get it to happen.  And if the two men in the small room didn’t know that she was really the reason their brothers never returned, so much the better.  They actually had been in a nearby village when she’d heard about the explosion.  The two guards he husband had sent with her were easy to dispatch, and now she had deaths that she knew the families of to make her vengeance complete.  No, the fault was laid on the man in there with them, because he didn’t know everyone that died that day and never would. 

-oooooo-OOOOOO-oooooo-

Silence reigned as Fury looked to Hill.  “Anything?” he yelled.

“Down to a ten kilometer radius, sir!” she called.

“Head that direction, how far?” Fury asked.

“Not sure, looks to be in the deserts of the southwest.  Maybe four hours?” she said.

Fury nodded.  “Lay in a course, at least we’ll be in the general area, ready both Quinjets and send out agents to canvas the area, we’ll have to stay on the helicarrier for her little conference calls.”

“We have to hurry,” Bruce said.  “He’s not looking that good after that one said something to him…”

Thor nodded.  “Friend Tony will prevail.  He is strong.”

“Even the strongest metal breaks, Thor,” Loki reminded his brother, looking thoughtful.  “I wish there was more I could do, but without a location…I will go on board with one of these SHIELD jets, and perhaps I can locate him before anything else happens to him that may be irreparable.”

Loki turned and left, heading to the nearest quinjet, where he boarded with no questions asked.  He, after all, looked like just another SHIELD agent.

Everyone took breaks to walk around, Bruce to have a small hulk out in the special room on the helicarrier, Steve to bust a few sandbags, Natasha to eviscerate a few targets, and Clint to rapidly riddle some other targets with holes.  To know what was happening and to be able to do nothing to stop it…it was maddening. 

“Avengers, we have a call, return,” came the call over the intercom. 

Soon, they were all reassembled in the room as the screen flickered to life, once again, the woman filling the screen.  “Hello my pretties, we’re almost done, then we get to play hide and seek for your little tin man.  Now…”   She turned and looked behind.  “Douse him with water, wake him up.  He’s not sleeping through this.  I have some more questions for him.  The good ones, now, about daddy.”

There was movement and they saw one of the men come in with a bucket and a splash followed by a choked gasp and coughing.  “That’s better,” she said, moving out of the way and everyone gasped. 

He’d obviously given them a fight.  Even after the cold water drenching, blood dripped down from his lip and nose, and his jaw sat at an awkward angle.  He leaned back against the chair, and they could see blood dripping onto the seat from his back.  His jeans were dark with water and blood.  Several obvious knife cuts were apparent across his chest and abdomen, and there was a small wound in his shoulder that looked deep and was seeping blood steadily.  His feet were bare and they could see one was sitting at an angle.

The worst was his eyes.  They were wide and vacant, refusing to focus on anything, and not even glancing at the screen they knew was being shown to him.

“Say hi to your friends, Tony,” she said, standing beside him and yanking his head up by the hair roughly.  He swallowed but his eyes refused to focus on them.  In fact, his eyes refused to go anywhere but the screen that was in front of him.

“Now, Tony, you remember why you are going to talk?” she asked in his ear.  With effort he nodded slowly.  “You’re going to tell them why you are so worthless, aren’t you? Why you don’t deserve to live?  Why you really, really need to die, and no one will miss you?  Right, Tony?”  He gave a slow nod again, making everyone on the helicarrier swallow hard. “You’re going to tell them what a shameful, poor excuse for a man you are.”

She dropped his head and stood behind him, and he arched up in obvious pain as she began to rub hands across his back.  “Nice job, huh, Tony?”  He merely nodded, eyes fixing on the floor now.

“Tell me, and your friends, what was life like with your dad, Howard Stark?” she said softly, almost purring the words.

Despite his state he flinched, and when he spoke his voice was raw and hoarse.  “He hated me when he noticed I was there.”

“Why’s that, Tony?” she asked.

“I wasn’t good enough, nothing was good enough, I couldn’t…couldn’t measure up, he said…when I showed him my first circuit board I was four and he said I should do better than that…and…and if he was drunk…” he swallowed, staring at the floor.  “It was worse.”

“Aw, poor Tony, did you get hit by your daddy?” she asked, apparently digging her nails into Tony’s back.

“Yes,” he gasped out, eyes showing some signs of life sparked by pain.  “’Til I left for MIT at fourteen.”

“Then what happened there, sweet Tony?”

“I was bullied because I was young and no one believed I was as smart as I said, so I…I didn’t have anyone until Rhodey.  But Rhodey…he couldn’t stop them all the time…” he said and gasped again as she dug into the wounds on his back.  “I…I…”

“Tell me, Tony, what did they do to you?  The first time you tried to kill yourself?” she whispered, Tony arching upward and gasping louder.

“I was fifteen.  Th-there was a party, and I thought…that Rhodey was there, they…they said they were his friends…but they weren’t…they got me a drink…then I was sick…and there were too many of them…too many hands…”  He was tilted backward now, eyes on the ceiling.  “Rhodey found me, after I got home…after I cut my wrists…and took me to the hospital…but no one…would believe me…no police report…looked bad for Stark Industries…Stock prices…”

“Ah, so that was when you became a weak nothing, when you stopped being a man, huh?” She asked, causing another hiss from Tony as her fingers dug into his wounds, and the Avengers could see blood dripping steadily to the floor behind him.  “Poor little Stark, is that why you went to fucking every man and woman you could find, Mr. Playboy?” she hissed in his ear.

“Make it safe,” he said softly, eyes closed now, and they realized he was fighting tears.  “Had to make it safe.  Was so numb…just wanted to feel again...”

She stood up, her hands coated red now as she patted him on the shoulder.  “What a disgusting little whore you are, you weren’t good enough for your father, and now…all trying to erase everything you became.  Merchant of Death and all…though I guess you got that directly from Dad now didn’t you.  Oh well, now,” she said, and they saw her unhook his hands, which fell forward from behind him slackly.  The purple and red bruising around both of them was quite apparent.  She dropped a knife into his thigh then, causing him to flinch and stare as blood welled around the new wound through the denim of his jeans.

“There ya go, Tony-boy,” she said, leaning over and kissing him on the forehead.  “Finish it yourself.  They’ll never look at you the same again, you know it.  End it.  Check mate, Avengers.  Bye.”

She turned and waved at the camera and left them watching as the screen went black, the last they saw was Tony staring at the knife embedded in his thigh.  They scrambled for the remaining Quinjet madly, needing to find him quickly. 

“How fast can we get to the area on the Quinjet?” Bruce asked as they ran through to the hangar. 

Clint shrugged.  “Depends on where exactly, fifteen minutes.”

“We might be too late,” Natasha said softly as they loaded and were gone in moments.

Loki got there first, and had been expanding his search slowly and caught movement nearby.  He directed the other SHIELD agents to stop and let him handle it.  There were several people in a building not far away.  He put himself there in the middle of the room, surprising the two men and one woman.  Loki could smell blood on them.  All drew guns on him, but Loki stood in his armor now, appearing as the god that he was.

“What have we here?” he asked.

The woman grinned, actually grinned.  “Hey, aren’t you that god that threw Tony Stark out of his own window?”

Loki nodded.  “Yes, as much good as it did since he’s still alive.”

“I doubt it, but what do you want?” she asked, suddenly defensive.

“Nothing much,” he said and a moment later, all three were unconscious on the ground.  He hadn’t even used magic.  He sighed and looked around and saw the trapdoor not far from him.  He opened it and went down.

“Loki, do you read?” buzzed the infernal earpiece.  It was the female.

“I do, may have found him, two men and a woman are knocked out inside the building I am nearest to, heading underground now.”

“Be careful, they left him with a knife.  He may…may have hurt himself, though he’s badly injured as it is.”

Loki didn’t bother to answer as he dropped down.  He really wished he didn’t have to know where he was going to teleport sometimes.  He followed his sense of smell to the strongest concentration of blood.  He opened a door and saw a blood spattered room, but it was not the room he was looking for.  He continued and found a second room smelling of blood and entered quickly.  It was dark, completely, and he sent a magical light to the ceiling and found what he was looking for.  It was indeed the Man of Iron, however, as they had warned, he appeared to be in bad shape, slumped over on the floor surrounded in a pool of blood.  As he got closer, he saw a knife lying beside him and deep cuts in his forearms still bleeding profusely. 

He kneeled and put a hand on each of his arms and closed his eyes, an intense green glow surrounding him as he staunched several bleeding wounds, including the deep ones in his arms. It took everything he had, and he wouldn’t be able to teleport him away, but he figured that dead and on their helicarrier was much worse than alive and waiting here.

“I’ve…staunched…bleeding…but too weak for transport…” Loki panted as he slumped to the floor beside the form that was still taking far too shallow breaths.  At least he wouldn’t bleed out.

It took another half an hour for the door to blow open and a blur of blue and red entered the room, darting forward to kneel beside him.  The scrawny hulk followed and dropped to his knees beside him as well.  Thor and Natasha followed quickly with Clint, all who stood aside.  Loki looked up to Thor.

“He’s not dead, but I’m exhausted of my magic, Thor.  I can help again tomorrow to speed the physical recovery,” Loki said, standing slowly, holding the wall as he wobbled a bit.  “I’ll need to remain here a few days to recover my magic.”

“Thank you, brother.  We all thank you.”

“Yeah, he would have long been dead by now,” Loki said, glancing down at the pool of blood that surrounded him. 

Soon Tony was loaded up and sent off on the quinjet to go to the helicarrier’s medical bay.  He was rushed into surgery to deal with some serious issues with his ankle and to deal with what they thought might be a punctured lung.  The Avengers, plus Loki, sat outside in the waiting room.  Fury came in a few moments later.

“We captured the three, and recovered all evidence from the place.  There was some other evidence from the closed circuit TVs that she didn’t transmit, though I don’t think Bruce should watch it if any of you choose to watch it.  She had them filmed when they took Tony out,” he said softly, not meeting any of their eyes.  “There were some others of them before they went to the tower and just after before Tony woke up.  There is no doubt all three of them will go away for this.  Natasha, I want you to do the interrogations.”

Fury turned and left and Natasha followed him silently.  Thoughts went through everyone’s heads, and they wondered how much of the people who did this would be left.  The scary thing for everyone in that room was that none of them cared if they died or not.  They had no right to do what they’d done to their friend, their companion, to Tony.


	4. Recall

There wasn’t much that could put one Pepper Potts into a frenzy.  Nope, her boss was none other than Tony Stark.  She’d had her hands almost four inches deep in the man’s chest for heaven’s sake.  There was not much that would surprise her.  There was not much that would send her heart rate skyward.  There was not much that made her panic. Not much indeed.  However, when the phone rings and the person on the other end is one of two people, she panics.  Well, one of them is a person; the other is an impressive AI that is almost as human as the other person.  So, as she sat comfortably on Happy Hogan’s sofa sipping an after dinner cocktail and the phone rang a number that wasn’t in her ID, she felt a tinge of worry.  Not many who would call her weren’t already in her phone.  Of course, this was a Starkphone, so after a moment, it recognized the number, announcing SHIELD in bold letters.  She answered.

“Pepper Potts,” she said, getting a questioning look from Happy.

“Ms. Potts, this is Nick Fury from SHIELD.  Tony’s been injured.”

She took a moment.  If Tony was injured, he’d call himself.  Unless he were too stubborn or too unconscious.  “How injured?”

“I think it best you come to the helicarrier.  I can send a car.”

So unconscious it was then.  “I’m not at home.”

“We know.  A car will be there in ten minutes.  Feel free to bring Mr. Hogan with you if you wish.”

She put the phone on her lap and looked vacant a moment.  “What is it?” Happy asked, frowning at her.

“Tony.  He’s hurt, they’re sending a car,” she said, her voice tight at the restraint of emotion.

“Must be serious,” Happy said, knowing almost as much about their mutual boss as she did.  “I didn’t see a call out for the Avengers, so I wonder what it could be?”

That had her rattled more than the call.  She stared at Happy.  If there were no call for the Avengers, that meant whatever happened, he wasn’t in his suit.  If he had been injured in the suit, JARVIS would have contacted her.  He always did.  No, this happened outside the Avengers.  She stood and grabbed her purse, Happy following behind her, locking up.  Happy held Tony in about as high regard as Pepper did, even if he didn’t say so in so many words.  Pepper remembered his nervousness when they told him they were dating about a month ago.  He was so afraid that Tony would be mad.  Instead, he got a smile and a clap to the back wishing him luck, and an offhand comment about it probably being better that the CEO wasn’t dating the owner of the business after all.

The car pulled up right on time, and both slid in.  No one questioned Pepper’s plus one.  They knew Happy, of course.  They were soon aboard the helicarrier after a brief helicopter ride from the helipad they took off from.  An agent escorted them to the waiting area.  She knew it was serious when she was met by four of the five remaining Avengers, suited up and armed still.  That meant no one had left to change into their civilian clothes.  That was more worrisome than Fury’s call.  Then, they all looked at her and she knew that this was really bad.

“What happened?” she asked, almost breathless as she entered, heels clicking against the tile noisily. 

Steve glanced at the others, and was given a nod by Bruce.  “Uh, Ms. Potts…” he started.

“Pepper, please,” she said, pushing her strawberry blonde hair from her face.

“Um, yeah, Pepper, he’s in surgery.  He should be fine, uh, physically…” he was stopped by a doctor coming out.  Bruce stood and moved closer, and everyone turned their attention on the man.

“He’s out of surgery, but considering the wounds, we’ve left him sedated for now,” the doctor said. 

Bruce nodded.  “How bad?”

“If the one that found him hadn’t staunched the bleeding, he would not be here.  As it was, he went into cardiac arrest twice before we were done, most likely due to shock and blood loss.  I’d suggest if that friend of yours can help again, let him.  The nerve damage in his arms is more than we can fix.  I’m not sure it will heal, and if it doesn’t, he’ll never have use of his hands again,” he said, glancing between them.

Thor nodded.  “My brother should be able to do something for him.”

Pepper turned and frowned at Thor.  “Loki?  Loki’s here?”

Steve held up both hands.  “Pepper, we’ll explain, but Loki’s the one that kept Tony from dying.”

She wanted to talk more but nodded and turned back to the doctor.  “Now, other than that, the rest of the wounds were worrisome on their own.  His back took about fifty stitches altogether.  I’m not sure what was used…”

“A bullwhip,” Steve said solemnly.  “We saw the footage.  Hit him about twenty to twenty five times with it.”

The doctor nodded.  “That would definitely account for the state of his back.  There were several cuts on his chest and abdominals that took about twenty more stitches, and he has two broken ribs and three fractures.  It was close, but his lungs were saved this time.”

“This time?” Steve asked frowning.

The doctor nodded.  “He’s had a punctured lung a few times, according to his files.  Most likely why his ribs broke so easily, there are a lot of old breaks.”

They glanced at Pepper who shook her head a bit and shrugged.  “Tony doesn’t talk about his past, let alone his medical stuff.”

The doctor nodded.  “There was a knife wound in his left leg that was quite deep, but miraculously missed the artery and the nerve, so that should recover.  The same for the knife wound in his right shoulder.  The right ankle had to be set with pins and he should stay off it for at least eight weeks, though he can walk on crutches after four, provided he wear the protective boot for it.”

Pepper swallowed.  Tony off his feet for more than two months?  This was going to be miserable for all of them.

“And, we did have to do some internal stitching from some severe tearing,” he said, and the others all looked slightly pale.  “Honestly, those wounds alone could have killed him given time, just from the blood loss from that trauma.”

“What trauma?” Pepper asked, looking at the doctor and then the Avengers who all were studiously avoiding her looks. 

The doctor looked nervous.  “Ah, I wasn’t aware that you weren’t informed yet, Ms. Potts.”

“I just got here.  Steve was about to tell me what happened.”

The doctor looked nervous.  “I…I think I should leave that to them, Ms. Potts.  I can only attest to what injuries he has, not how he received them.  I recommend you have a psych consult available when we bring him out of sedation.  He’ll be on suicide watch immediately as well, so he won’t be allowed to leave the room.”

As he left Pepper turned and arched a brow at Steve, who was staring at the floor.  “Suicide watch?”

“Um, the arms, he did that himself before we got to him…” Steve said.

She nodded and sat into the nearest seat heavily.  “Again,” she said quietly.

“This isn’t news to you,” Bruce said softly.

“No, he’s attempted it a few times that I know of, at least three times.  The first time, he was fifteen, the next he was eighteen, and the third was after Afghanistan,” she said softly.

“Yeah, we heard about the first time,” Steve said softly and she looked up at him.

Pepper frowned.  “What happened this time, exactly?  He’d been doing so well, taking care of himself, even staying off the alcohol.”

“We were at the tower, watching movies, and someone got into the system and shut down the power.  Then this video starts playing from when Tony was in Afghanistan.  It was a video of the surgery where they put the thing in his chest, and then another where they water boarded him.  It looked like the terrorists had been recording it at the time.  Then we passed out, and when we woke up he was gone.  Then this woman contacted us, saying she was going to make Tony pay for killing her husband when he escaped the Ten Rings.  She said she was going to make him tell his secrets…we didn’t know it, but she had snipers on you and Rhodey, and told him if he refused, you’d die.  So you know Tony…” Steve said.

“Show me,” she said simply.  “I want to see what happened.  For myself.”

Bruce shook his head.  “Pepper, I don’t think that’s a good idea…they filmed everything…and what they did…”

“Well, you are obviously not telling me everything.  You aren’t telling me what was so bad that he’d be pushed to suicide again.”

Clint stood beside her now, putting a hand on her shoulder.  “It was revenge, pure and simple, they wanted to humiliate and break him.  That was all.  They didn’t want anything, but they wanted us to be disgusted by him, what had happened to him, what he had done, but it didn’t work.  We care about Tony even more now, if nothing else.  They waterboarded him, they cut him, they whipped him, and they raped him.”

Pepper blinked and her eyes instantly filled.  “What?  Why?”

Bruce couldn’t look at her.  “I think that they wanted to repeat why he tried to kill himself the first time, from what I could tell.  They’d found out about the fact he’d been assaulted when he was at MIT and tried to cut his wrists, and that Rhodey had found him before he bled out then, and that’s what they wanted, and they almost got it.  If Loki hadn’t found him…”

“I still need to see it.  Whatever you saw.  I have to know.”

Bruce nodded.  “I’ll take you to the lab and show you the files.”

Bruce left with her and Happy in tow, leaving the remaining Avengers waiting.  After a long half hour, Natasha returned, her red hair perfectly tied back and an in a clean uniform.  She had Fury behind her.

“Status?” Fury asked.

“He’s out of surgery, but they want to keep him sedated for a while, so he doesn’t pull out any of the stitches when he wakes up.  Pepper Potts was here with someone, and Bruce took her to the lab because she wanted to see the transmissions,” Steve said, standing up in front of the director from his place in the hard plastic chair.

Fury nodded.  “We got some information out of our friends.”

Natasha nodded.  “The woman was not willing to talk, it took some strong persuading.  The two men were quite willing given some minor persuasion.   Turns out the two men both had brothers that died around the time Tony escaped, however, they were not killed by Tony’s escape at all.  She went a little insane when she found out her husband was dead and killed them herself, they were her bodyguards.  She used their deaths and brought them into her cause, to destroy Tony completely.  I’m tempted to throw her in the cell with the two men before I castrate both of them.  Just to see that she gets what she deserves but Fury won’t let me.  If we hadn’t captured them, she had plans to release copies of the whole thing into the media to completely destroy everything he’d ever touched, as she put it, as well as all the records she had managed to dig up.  Not surprisingly, what she had were paper copies that Tony couldn’t erase electronically.”

“What did she have?” Steve asked, frowning.

Fury sighed.  “Medical records from childhood on up through Afghanistan.  These are things I’ve never seen, and I thought I had access to everything before Tony hacked his file.”

Fury handed Steve a thick file folder with copies of whatever originals they had found.  Steve opened it to the first page and stared for a long time as he read it.  The first entry was a medical file from when he had been hurt as a young child.  It had been in a “playground accident” but there was a notation on it that had been covered with white out.

He frowned.  “This…he had broken ribs and a punctured lung at seven?”

Steve flipped through the file.  Up until fourteen there were several admissions to have stitches and bones set.  He noted on several of the papers where the admitting nurses and doctors requested a police consult on the issue, only to have it marked out with a line.  Certain things were circled and someone would put notes around it, only to have them scratched out by someone else.  It took a minute, but Steve could see the lines a bit on one that hadn’t been scratched out as heavily.  Suspected child abuse.

Steve frowned.  “Howard…how could he…” he muttered, continuing on the file.  Suddenly, the super soldier found everything clicking together in his mind.  Tony’s constant flippant attitude.  His hatred of anything related to Howard Stark.  The way he reacted when Steven mentioned Howard.  The things that he did to avoid having conversations with Steve about the past.  So many things began to make sense.

He came to the admittance for the suicide attempt.  They had gone as far as getting the psychiatric notes somehow.  He frowned as he read out loud.

“Patient admitted under John Doe.  Presenting suicide attempt, patient vertically slit both forearms, opening veins directly with unusual precision.  Age fifteen.  Obvious signs of recent sexual assault at admittance.  Admitting physician stated patient presented with flat affect and acute mutism, possible catatonia, unwilling to communicate.  Accompanied by a friend that wished to also remain anonymous.  Against my better judgment, hospital director has instructed files to remain under the name John Doe,” Steve said quietly.  He looked up.  “This is worse than we could have thought.  They knew this had happened…and they used it against him.”

Steve continued to flip through files, coming to a second file on a suicide attempt.  “This was the second time.  This time it doesn’t say much, just he was admitted for a heroin overdose, and they believed it was intentional.  They kept him through rehab after that.”

By now, a pale Pepper had returned with Bruce.  “Yeah, it wasn’t long after his parents died in the car crash.”

Steve shook his head.  “How did they manage to get this stuff?” he said, pulling up a set of notes from a therapist.  “Patient presented with extreme aggression and resistance.  During the interview process, it became necessary to sedate, which is counterproductive to rehabilitation of the drug addiction, but patient became violent.  Patient finally calmed enough to explain that he hadn’t tried to kill himself because of his parents.  Reported they could ‘go to hell’ for all he cared.  After some time with the patient, we have diagnosed severe depression.”  Steve flipped a couple pages, coming to a scrawled page written, obviously for one of the therapies.

“It’s something he wrote, it says ‘Who I Miss’ and then ‘Who Misses Me’ across the top, with columns, he wrote Jarvis in the who I miss column.  I thought Jarvis was his AI?” Steve said, looking over at them.  Pepper shook her head.  Even she didn’t know that there had been a real Jarvis in his life.

“The really scary part is that he wrote ‘no one’ in the other column.  Then the therapist has written ‘why?’ underneath it.  He’s scrawled ‘not worth it’.  That’s it.”

Steve flicked through it a little more, finding other, similar papers.  He held up another one.  “It says here that she wants to diagnose him with OCD, PTSD, Major Depressive Disorder, and ADHD.  Its noted possible Bipolar tendencies.  Prescriptions recommended are…extensive.”

The last page was a few pages from post Afghanistan.  “This was from when he got back, describes that he should be treated for severe PTSD and chronic pain.  The PTSD I get, but chronic pain?” Steve said, looking up.

Bruce nodded.  “The reactor.  He told me once that it gave him problems, I mean, how could it not.  He had bones removed as well as muscle.  His heart and lungs were moved for that thing to fit into him.  I caught him wincing once and asked him if he wanted something for it and he said if he took anything for it he’d always be taking something for it.  He also said his lung capacity was only about seventy five percent of normal once when I was taking his blood oxygen and it was almost ninety.  He waved me off when I tried to put oxygen on him.”

Steve frowned.  “Really?  How does he do everything in the Iron man suit like that?  He never acts like anything bothers him.”

Pepper smiled wanly.  “He’s used to it.  JARVIS told me that the suit itself causes him pain when he’s in it.”

Steve frowned.  “What?  Why would the suit cause him pain?”

She shook her head.  “JARVIS said that he doesn’t say anything but he can tell because when the suits attach to the reactor it moves, almost so little that it wouldn’t be noticed but it’s enough to trigger a pain sensation for a brief moment when it connects and disconnects.  I asked Tony once and he dismissed it, saying not to bother about it, it was part of his payment.”

Steve shook his head and noticed another paper behind the rest with the heading “Merchant of Death” on the top.  He noticed it was in a different hand and held it up.  “This looks like our woman wrote it or something.”

The paper was covered with records of sales of Stark Industries weapons to the Ten Rings and other transactions where the weapons were decidedly not in American hands.  It also detailed sales to the American military.  Just then, the door opened and they looked up to see an unfamiliar face.  Pepper smiled and hugged him.

“Rhodey!” she said.  “Why are you here?”

He smiled gently at her.  “I came to see what happened this time.  They said it was bad and he’d cut himself open again.”

He looked around.  Pepper smiled.  “Avengers, this is Colonel James Rhodes, or Rhodey as he gets called by Tony.”

Introductions were made all around, and then he was filled in on the details and thumbed through the records, stopping when he got to the file on the first suicide attempt.

“God, I remember that.  I thought he was dead when I found him.  He’d filled up the tub, cut open his veins, and it was only him not answering the phone that led me to go check up on him.  It was about five in the morning.  I had no idea what had happened, and when they told me he’d been raped at some point before he cut his wrists, I just couldn’t understand.  Tony was such a proud kid, you know.  Fifteen years old and smarter than everyone there, but no one wanted to admit that this spoiled rich brat knew what he was supposed to know.  The worst bullies were the teachers, and I couldn’t stop them.  The other students, I could help with…sometimes,” he said, glancing at the notes.

“I called his dad, you know.  Right after I put him in the hospital that morning.  Some black suited man came and talked to the hospital director, and I guess money changed hands, because his name was redacted from the files immediately, and I wasn’t allowed to see him in the hospital until he was released.  I think he went for a mid-semester vacation according to the papers, which made it so much worse when he came back two weeks later.  No one could know he’d been locked in a psych ward for that time.  His dad threatened to have me kicked out of MIT if I ever mentioned it again,” he said, looking up.

Rhodey snorted and sighed.  “I don’t think I ever hated Howard more than that moment.  I tried to tell him that Tony had been sexually assaulted.  All he said was he should have stayed home and studied instead of leaving the dorm that he had no one to blame but himself.  It was after that Tony got wild, really wild, you know.  The drugs started then, and I swear he had a different girl every week.  Or guy.  Just depended on when you caught him.  He had the money and he spent it.  I think he wrecked at least five sportscars before he graduated.  But still, even with all that, he graduated summa cum laude.  I still can’t get my head around that.  I’ve seen him ace tests on things that most people can’t even understand the fundamentals of while he was higher than a kite…” he said, shaking his head.

He looked thoughtful again.  Steven nodded.  “Who was Jarvis?”

Rhodey looked surprised.  “Ah, Jarvis, God, I thought Tony was going to die without him.  He was the family butler when Tony was growing up.  He always said he was more of a father than Howard was.  Obie, he was his godfather, but Jarvis, he actually cared.  Unassuming British man, graying.  He was driving when the crash happened.  Killed all three of them.  Tony swore that Jarvis wasn’t at fault for the wreck, even though they tried to say he was.  Tony was sure that Howard had something to do with it.  It was the loss Jarvis that drove him to overdose.  He just couldn’t imagine life without him.  Obie didn’t help, feeding him his first drinks after the funeral.  After that, Tony and alcohol became tied together.  He left the drugs behind, but alcohol was how he coped.”

Steve stared at the ground.  “I…how could I miss so much?”

Rhodey sighed.  “Captain, it isn’t your fault Tony hides himself.  He doesn’t trust anyone.  Maybe me and Pepper, probably Happy too, but even that trust isn’t complete.  Tony covers it with snark and sarcasm, and the more he hurts, the more of an asshole he becomes.  The reason is pretty simple, the less people have access to him the better.  So he lives a life of pushing everyone away, drowning in liquor, and grabbing one night stands to try to get a chance at the human contact he won’t allow himself.”

Steve was beside himself. Everything, _everything_ , he thought he knew about Tony was so terribly wrong in so many ways.  Cocky, self-assured, self-absorbed…was any of it real?  Or was it all just there to push them away?  He spent hours avoiding them all, hours in his labs working with machines.  Was it any wonder now that he did that?

“Machines are the only things that won’t hurt him,” Steve said finally, looking up at the others.  “That’s why he spends so much time with them, why he seems to only show affection for those bots and JARVIS.  They’re programmed and they’re everything to him.  He was more worried that this woman had done something to JARVIS than anything else.”

Pepper nodded solemnly.  “Yet he’ll fly a nuke through a portal to save New York.”

Steve couldn’t forget that.  Selfish, he’d thought.  Completely selfish.  Yet he, as the only one that could fly, took the very large chance of dying, and very nearly did.  And then to find out that he was living with such…issues.  He sat down heavily, mind working furiously.  To think, he thought he’d had everything that Howard could give him.  Instead?  He’d had a horrid childhood and his closest friend was his butler.  His butler…not even a nanny or someone else.  How sad was that?  And here he was lamenting that all his friends and family were long dead and gone, and Tony…Tony didn’t have anyone to protect him.  Sure, he put on the suit, but the rest of the time he was still wearing a suit of armor, no one could see it.  And now, this horrible woman had ripped off that armor that Tony had crafted for so long.  And Tony obviously thought there was no way he could live without that armor.  He desperately needed it.  And now…he knew they’d all seen.  They knew it.

Would he even be able to recover from this?

“We’ve been so fucking blind,” Clint said finally, gaining everyone’s attention.  “How could we, professional liars, not see?” he asked, pointing to Natasha and himself.  “We are only alive based on our ability to read people, to see past masks and get to the bottom of things, and he hid from us.  Better than anyone ever has before.”

Natasha had taken his hand without him noticing.  He looked up with wide eyes meeting hers.  “Yeah, well, I knew more than you did, but even I hadn’t been able to uncover half of this stuff.  The most I knew was about this Obie guy taking the arc reactor and leaving him to die.”

Steve frowned.  “His godfather?”

Pepper nodded.  “Obadiah Stane.  He was Howard Stark’s business partner and ran the company until Tony turned twenty one, then he partnered with Tony.  He ordered the hit on Tony while he was in Afghanistan, and when he escaped, he wanted the miniaturized arc reactor technology for himself, so he could make better weapons.  He came in to the Malibu house and took out the arc reactor from his chest and left him to die.  Luckily, he had the old one that I’d kept for him.  He made it to the lab and got it plugged in before he died.  He nearly killed himself in taking him out.  He died when he fell into the full sized arc reactor after Tony had me explode it.  Tony was on the roof at the time, and almost did die again because he had the old arc reactor and it wasn’t made to handle the power drain.”

“Tony’s been through hell,” Bruce said finally.  “I think we’ve all had our own version of hell, but I think we all know each other’s tales.  This…this is something even I wasn’t expecting.  You’d expect a billionaire to have a great life.  Shows how wrong we were to assume.”

It was a long night.  No one wanted to leave, but eventually, through unspoken agreement, they ended up taking turns to go get food and rest for a couple hours at a time.  Eventually, Tony was moved to a large, open room (well, it was supposed to hold four beds, but they were cleared out because the staff was well aware that the other Avengers wouldn’t have left).  A couch and a couple more comfortable chairs and a small table were added.  Normally, the staff would have protested, but it was the Avengers themselves who found the furnishing in other places throughout the helicarrier and brought them in.  They weren’t really sure where Loki had wandered off too, and eventually asked Thor, who said he’d gone to rest so he could help Tony after his magic returned.

Time seemed to crawl by and eventually the sedatives were weaned off and Steve had fallen asleep in the chair beside the bed.  It was late morning, and the fact that he was sleeping was testament to how exhausted he and the rest of the group was.  Natasha and Clint were sprawled out together on the couch, leaning against each other in a deep sleep.  Pepper and Rhodey had gone to find sleep elsewhere, only at the insistence of the others.  Bruce had gone to the lab to go over the footage again.  He wanted anything that could help his friend get through the situation.  Tony himself was strapped down with restraints so that he didn’t aggravate any of his wounds.  They found out that as soon as the sedation started wearing off, he started to fight against his tubing.  So to keep his IV in place, and to avoid him ripping any of the stitches from his back or front, he was restrained at wrist, bicep, and knee.  The psych consult had informed them that he might have an adverse reaction to being restrained when he did wake up.

The first time he came close to wakefulness, Steve wasn’t sure he’d heard anything.  He snapped awake, now unable to sleep through the slightest disturbance.  He blinked wearily and stared at Tony’s slack, bruised face.  His nose had been set, and the split in his lip had taken a couple stitches.  The concussion had been moderate to the back of his head but the swelling had already started to go down.  They were a little worried though, because with head injuries it was hard to tell for sure how much damage was done.  But then, just as Steve was about to nod off again, he heard it again, and his eyes snapped up to see Tony’s eyes roll a bit under the lids.

“Tony?” he asked.  “Are you awake?”

Tony’s mouth moved as though he was trying to say something but then he seemed to fall back to sleep.  Steve went to tell the doctor immediately, and he said it was a good sign that he might wake up in the next day or so.  Throughout the day, they saw other small indications of consciousness returning.  A twitch of a finger, a scrunch of his brow.

Steve was on watch again that evening when he finally jolted to full wakefulness and started to immediately panic.  Steve stood and leaned over him, trying to put his face close to Tony’s so he could see him. 

“Tony!  Tony, its Steve, you’re okay, come on, look at me!” he said, trying to get the man’s mind off the restraints he was fighting.  “You’re restrained because of your wounds, Tony, look at me, please!”

Tony’s wide, frantic eyes finally locked with Steve’s blue ones and Steve fought his own horror at the look of complete terror that passed through them.  It took a moment, but Steve felt the tension start to lesson in his arms and his eyes stopped moving randomly around the room.

“Wha…Cap…where am I?” he muttered, words still slightly slurred.

“You’re on the helicarrier in the medbay.  You’ve got a lot of stitches, so they had to restrain you so you didn’t pull them out, so please, don’t fight them,” he said, placing a hand on his bicep.

Tony nodded, eyes still obviously confused, as he looked around.  “I hurt everywhere…” he muttered then glanced at his arms.  “I can’t feel my fingers.  Why can’t I feel my fingers?”

Steve patted him and scooted the chair forward.  “Don’t worry about that, Loki is going to help fix that tomorrow.”

Tony frowned and looked at him.  “Loki?  What’s he doing here? I though he…was in time out in Asgard or sumthin’,” he muttered, and Steve could tell he was already getting tired.

“Thor brought him to help find you, good thing too, he saved you. He’s been…reformed, turns out he wasn’t entirely under his own control at the time,” he said with a grin.  “He’s still a pain, but at least he isn’t trying to take over the world and rule everyone.”

Tony nodded, swallowing.  He was really starting to wonder why he couldn’t really feel his fingers.  He could twitch them, but something was wrong with them.  There were thick bandages covering both forearms and then it hit him.  His eyes widened and he yanked upward on the restraints reflexively.

“Damn,” he muttered, dropping his head back into the pillow.  “Can’t even off myself right, end up maiming my stupid ass, worse than dying if I can’t work anymore…” he muttered as he slipped back into unconsciousness.

Steve bit his lip.  Oh boy…he really hoped that Loki cold do something about his arms.  He wasn’t sure what they’d do if Tony couldn’t use his hands.  He wouldn’t be able to do anything he wanted to do.  And he knew that if Tony really wanted to end his life, he’d find a way.  He was far smarter than any of them.

Bruce came in not too long afterward, and Steve told him what had happened.  “Steve, you go get some real rest, I’ll sit with him for a while.  I napped already earlier.  Thor said that Loki is going to come by in a few hours and try and use his magic to fix his arms.”

Steve nodded and headed back to his temporary quarters on the helicarrier, stopping by the cafeteria to grab a sandwich before he went in.  He sat heavily on his cot and ate thoughtfully.  He was so stupid, he thought to himself, berating himself.  He’d never seen it.  He’d insulted him and now he wondered how much it had hurt Tony.  He shook his head, and decided he couldn’t sleep.  So he pulled up the laptop and searched for some information.

He typed in Howard Stark, and browsed over several news articles.  He then tried Howard and Anthony Stark.  This yielded some articles about the two of them as Tony grew up and quite a few blogs.  He frowned and brought up one that he noted was labeled a conspiracy blog.  It was written by someone that had worked in a hospital that Tony had gone to several times as a child.  The source was anonymous, but claimed to have witnessed several telling exchanges between the boy and his father.  The things he’d written about sent Steve’s mind into a spin.

But what made him wonder was a quote on the page that sent Steve’s stomach through the floor.  _“Most memorable was when I entered the room where the young man, twelve at this time, sat with severe burns on his hands. Second degree from what we could tell, and when asked, he said he tried to pick up a piece of hot metal and didn’t know it was hot.  His hands had been wrapped and Howard didn’t see me.  I’ll never forget the biting comment that made the boy’s tears fall where pain of having his burns cleansed had no moments before.  ‘If it weren’t for your incompetence, my search would be over already.  You will finish, bandaged hands or not, I don’t care how much it hurts. I will find Steve, and you will not stop me with your foolishness.”  I couldn’t but wonder what he meant, but after some questioning the staff, it was something to do with Howard Starks search for the body of Captain America.  What the boy was meant to finish, I had no idea._

Steve frowned and searched again, this time using his own name and Howard Stark.  Pages and pages of information came up, including more of these self-described conspiracy blogs.  He came across several interviews with people that knew Tony and Howard that never made it into the media.

“ _I knew something was wrong when the famous Howard Stark showed up at the pier with a child in tow.  I asked what he’d brought an eight year old child to a deep sea mission in the artic for.  He claimed it was so he could assist him in finding his son’s idol.  I noticed that the child was grinning broadly.  I asked what he was happy for.  He told me that he built an underwater robot to help his dad out finding Captain America.  I couldn’t help but smile at his big brown eyes and bright grin.  I barely noticed the healing black eye the child had.  I’d heard about Anthony by then, of course, who hadn’t?  All of us on the boats were used to seeing Howard show up on one of his ‘missions’ with some bit of new technology to find the downed Steve Rogers._

_“But this was the first time he brought Anthony.  And as I looked I wondered where the rest of the boy’s clothes were because he was certainly not outfitted for an arctic expedition.  He wore a light jacket and a pair of tennis shoes.  He did have a scarf and hat, but I could see no gloves.  I asked Howard about gloves, and he dismissed me, saying he had to do too many things with the fine controls of the robotic thing he’d made to wear gloves._

_“It didn’t surprise me when a week into the expedition, the boy sat shivering in the cabin with a case of frostbite on his fingers.  It was close, almost leading us to lose several of his fingers, but Howard Stark warned us that we’d all lose our jobs if he didn’t keep his hands functioning.  Several times, when we’d left the room, we heard yelling from the elder Stark, apparently berating his son for being stupid enough to get frostbite at such an important juncture in their search.  If anyone else noticed the bruise on the child’s jaw, no one mentioned it.  But I noticed, and I mentioned it.  A month later, I found myself blacklisted on all the fishing boats in the area.  I wasn’t sorry, not in the least.  And I’ll never forget the gentle smile I got as Howard Stark yanked the boy away from me after I told him exactly what I thought of the way he treated his son.”_

Steve was finding it hard to breathe as again and again he found accounts like these.  He picked up his Starkphone which was connected to JARVIS.  He punched the button he knew brought the AI to his attention.

“Captain Rogers, how can I help you?” the smooth British tones of the AI said.

“JARVIS, is there any way to determine the validity of something I found on the Internet?” he asked.

“I can attempt it.  Is it what you are currently viewing on the helicarrier’s system?”

“It is.  I want to know if these things are real, and I’d like to talk to these people, but I don’t know how to find their names.”

“I can generate a list of names and phone numbers for you, Captain Rogers.  Should I search the previous pages for this information as well?” JARVIS asked smoothly.

“Yes, please.  Thank you, JARVIS,” Steve said, leaning back.

“Of course, sir, anything you need.”

Steve continued his searching, reading blogs and personal accounts.  Some of these people were no doubt in their eighties or nineties by this point, but perhaps he could glean some real answers as to what was happening with Howard.


	5. Falling

**Chapter Five**

_Falling_

The Avengers never left Tony alone, not for a moment, over the next two weeks.  At least one of them stayed with him, most times more than one.  The helicarrier med bay was advanced and Tony didn’t argue when they wanted to keep him there instead of letting Bruce take him back to the tower.  None of them had seen Tony like this before; he was quiet.  He did as the doctor and nurses said. He didn’t offer any resistance.  He just lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling.  Loki, each day, had been performing the complex magic to repair Tony’s arms.  It was taking multiple sessions to deal with the damage to the nerves.  Loki tried to engage Tony in conversation only to be met with a blank stare and noncommittal response.

Finally, at the end of the second week, finished, Loki sat back in the chair and stared at the Man of Iron.  Tony stared back silently.

Loki sighed.  “You know, Man of Iron, everyone does not have to be your enemy.  I certainly am not your enemy any more even though I was before.”

Tony stared at him for a moment and turned his head away. Loki continued speaking anyway.  “Torture and manipulation tends to change a person’s point of view,” Loki said with a shrug.  “Now that I’ve regained control over myself, it is apparent what they were doing.  The staff you are seeking had a hold over my mind as well, but the magic was only part of what happened to break me.  To know that I let them break me, and use me, it was very hard for me for a long time, Stark.”

Tony stared for a long moment before he spoke, far too quietly.  “So you really weren’t doing all that because you wanted to?”

“Yes and no,” Loki answered, crossing his arms and staring upward for a moment.  “I was angry at Odin, he lied to me for what he believed was my own good, and kept the fact I wasn’t a true prince of Asgard from me.  I was taken from the frost giants and raised among the Aesir, as one of them, when I was Jotun.  And being raised among warriors as a magical being is not easy.  I was angry, and those that captured me used that anger and twisted it into blind rage.  In truth, I only sought my father’s approval.”

Tony nodded.  “I know that feeling…what is wrong with fathers who expect their kids to be something they aren’t?”  His voice, though still soft, was slightly stronger than before.

Loki smiled.  “They are not perfect beings, Tony Stark.  They are far from it.  Some more than others, but alas, what may we do?”

“I can’t do much, mine’s dead.”  Tony’s voice was flat, completely without emotion.

Loki shook his head.  “Mine’s an immortal king, so there is not much to be done with him, and I murdered my Jotun father.”

“So what do we do?” Tony said, looking up at the ceiling again morosely.

Loki shrugged.  “Find someone else to depend on.  That is all we may do, Tony Stark.  I have come to realize that sometimes the closest thing to one’s heart is often within arm’s reach.”  Loki stood and smiled sadly at Tony for a moment.  “But sometimes even that seems too far away.”

Tony sighed as the doctors came in and examined him.  Loki had healed his arms nearly completely and accelerated the healing in the rest of his body.  He wouldn’t be bound to the medbay for much longer, and that was something those standing outside the room were not looking forward to in the least.

“At least he spoke to my brother,” Thor said quietly to the others as they watched through the one way mirror.  “Perhaps a connection has been made between them.”

Steve frowned.  “Though to hear Loki utter such heartfelt words is strange.  It sounded like he spoke from experience.”

Thor shook his head.  “I am not sure to what he refers to.  He has not had a romantic relationship since he was in love with his daughter Hel’s mother…”

Everyone stared at Thor.  “Loki has a child?” Natasha said finally.

Thor nodded, frowning.  “More than one, of course.  Hel is the ruler of the underworld, and he mothered Slepinir, Odin’s mount.”

“Wait, mothered?” Bruce said, tilting his head.  “Like, in the old mythology where he turned into a female horse?”

Thor looked at them and grinned.  “Yes!  I am surprised that got converted to earth’s lore.”

Clint shook his head.  “You’re telling me Loki can turn into a female animal if he wants?  To the point he can actually give birth?”

Thor nodded.  “He’s a master shape shifter.  He can take any form he wishes, and the changes are not only on the surface, he becomes what he changes into.  He did have to remain a horse until Slepinir was born, however, or else he wouldn’t have been able to birth him.  But he has more than one occasion tricked people with one of his female guises.”

Everyone blinked confused for a while, imagining being able to change into other things like that.  Finally, Clint cleared his throat.  “So, then he’s like bi.”

Thor looked at him curiously for a long moment.  “Bi?” he asked, frowning.

Natasha rolled her eyes.  “Bisexual.  Meaning he finds interest in both men and women.”

“Oh, yes, Midgardians have that definition of sexuality.  It really doesn’t work like that in Asgard, a person’s value as a partner is not dependent on their gender, honestly.  Living such long lives gives us the benefit of not considering those minor sort of details,” Thor said, almost in a distracted fashion, as though such things should be quite obvious.

Steve frowned deeply for a second.  “You mean it isn’t…odd to feel attraction to women and men in your world?  I’d think, since the Norse are warriors…”

Thor shook his head.  “Not at all.  There are many warriors who take another man as their partner.  Bondings can be done for any who wish it.”

-oooooo-OOOOOO-oooooo-

By the end of the day, Steve sat alone in his room on the helicarrier staring at the wall in silence.  He’d spent the day digging through information JARVIS had helped him find.  He’d recruited Black Widow and Hawkeye to help him as well.  They’d taken a Quinjet and spent most of the day visiting people that JARVIS had located that still lived.  What he found out left him cold as though he were still frozen in the ice.

Joseph Stelvel had been the first.  He’d been on the ship that Tony and his dad had gone on the artic trip on that had left his hands so badly frostbitten.  He had welcomed Steve into his home, and talked about the many expeditions he’d had with Howard Stark.

“So you went out with Howard a lot?” he asked, sipping the tea he’d been given by the old man.

“Aye, I did.  I still can’t believe I’m looking at the real Captain America, I remember it well.  Can’t remember lunch, but I remember back then like it weren’t nothing,” He said, smiling.

“Oh, my yes sir.  At least fifteen times we went out into the arctic circle with him.  He was a mite bit obsessed, you know,” Joseph said with a grin.  “But he only took that boy of his out a couple times, shame too; I did enjoy the kid when he came along.”

Steve smiled.  “Oh yeah?”

Joseph grinned in return.  “He was so happy and excited when I saw him on the docks.  He would talk and talk to us about what he was doing, until Mr. Stark came into the room, then the boy wouldn’t say a word.  Never did like that bit, you know?  Something wrong when a kid won’t talk around his pop.  Course there were the rumors about that whole thing.  Too small a ship to keep things quiet.”

“Rumors?” Steve asked with a frown.  He was sure he knew of which rumors the old sea dog spoke.

“Aye, that he hit the boy.  It came up now and then, boy’d come one deck with a bruise or somethin’, and he’d say he tripped and fell, but we knew better.  Them walls in a ship ain’t that thick, you know,” the old man said with a sigh.  “Wasn’t too surprised when I seen that kid in the news, been into drugs and messes.  Can’t grow up right without a pop to keep you straight.  And I swear, Howard weren’t that kind of pop.”

Steve sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose.  “I’m sorry to have bothered you, I just…Tony was in an accident and some of this stuff came out.  I just had to find out…”

Joseph nodded.  “Ya, it ain’t fun when ya find out the people you thought ya knew weren’t who they used ta be.  Shame, ya know, that he didn’t treat that boy better.  He idolized his dad.  I can remember when he weren’t around, the kid would go on and on about the things his dad did, and the inventions and how much he just wanted to be just like him one day.  And boy howdy was he excited to help search for you, Captain.  I remember looking down into those big brown eyes of his and he just grinned ear to ear, telling me how they were gonna find you and get you out of the water and he couldn’t wait to talk to you.”

Steve’s face fell and he closed his eyes for a long moment.  Joseph spoke softly.  “Take it when you and the boy met it didn’t go as well as all that.”

Steve shook his head.  “Tony’s been through more than I can imagine, and I didn’t help things.  I thought I knew Howard, and so I thought I knew Tony.  It would seem I was wrong on both counts.  I thank you for the tea, and your time,” Steve said and left, mounting his bike and taking off to nowhere in particular.

“Cap?” buzzed the intercom in his ear.  It was Natasha.

“Yeah?” he answered, slowing down.

“I…there’s some things you should see that we’ve found,” Hawkeye supplied.

“Got the location, will meet you there,” he said with a sigh and turned the bike around and headed toward where Clint and Natasha had told him to get to.  He was a bit worried.

-oooooo-OOOOOO-oooooo-

Steve dismounted his bike outside what looked to be a storage unit where another bike, Natasha’s, sat parked.  He made his way over to where he saw Hawkeye standing at the doorway of one of the larger units.  He frowned, obviously, it wasn’t an emergency situation, but something was going on.  He didn’t see the rest of the team, though.  That didn’t surprise him, though.  He knew that Bruce would have stayed to keep an eye on Tony. 

“What’s up?” he asked as he came nearer to the unit.

“I thought you’d want to see this before I brought in Fury,” Natasha said, coming up and handing Steve a journal.

Steve opened it and found it was emblazoned with the hydra seal on the first page.  He frowned and found there were newspaper clippings inside it, like some sort of scrapbook.  They were all about Tony from the time he first started getting media attention.  Steve looked up at Natasha.

“What…I don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head.

“Come on,” she said, leading him into the storage unit and flipping on the lights.  Steve’s jaw dropped.

The place was papered with pictures, articles, drawings, maps, all about Tony.  There were photos pasted to the walls that followed Tony from childhood to very recent.  He frowned an turned a circle seeing different things pasted everywhere around the room.  Maps with points marked and post-it notes with commentary written on them.  On the large desk was a photo of “Anna” and the two men who had been with her when she captured Tony.  It started to make sense.  They hadn’t found anyone else that was helping her.  The snipers, the people that had set things up, they had been chasing ghosts to find them.  Now, it all clicked into place.  Hydra. 

“How’d you find this place?” he said softly. 

“Just a random call, but Steve, I think they wanted us to find it, because look,” she said, picking up a page on an easel with a large paper pad on it.

The Hydra symbol was crudely drawn and a note was written below it.

“We’ve seen what you’ve been doing.  Make no mistake, next time, Starrk won’t escape me.  He’s mine, and you won’t have him.”

Steve blinked and then heard something.  “Natasha, Clint, go, run!” he said, recognizing the sound of a timer initializing.

Clint and Natasha bolted, but before Steve ran, he grabbed the journal and another book that was laying open on the desk.  He managed to roll as the blast threw them.  All three escaped with minor injuries and soon they were all back on the helicarrier in the conference room with both the journals open on the table.

“So our best guess is that someone gathered all this?” Fury said, watching the video that Natasha had gotten before the place exploded.

“Those are originals,” Steve said, pausing it and pointing to the older pictures.  “Those aren’t easy to come by.  Whoever this was took those pictures.”

“But that would mean they’re at least twenty or more years older than Tony,” Natasha said, shaking her head. 

Bruce came in a dropped a file on the table.  “They’re not.  It’s a variation on the super soldier serum,” he said, dropping into a chair.  “The DNA traces from the books confirm it.  Some are thirty five years old, and the DNA from the recent additions is the same, and hasn’t aged.  It carries some of the markers of the serum Steve has, but not all of them.  Whoever this is has been altered on the molecular level like Steve was.”

“Are we saying that whoever this is designed Anna’s attack?  Why would anyone do that?  He almost died,” Natasha said.  “How would that have played into this obvious obsession?”

Bruce picked up the second journal.  “I think the serum drove this person mad,” Bruce said, sighing.  “He writes about knowing that he’s supposed to have Tony, from the time he saw Tony as an infant.  The writing is disturbing, to say the least.  It is like he’s completely fixated on him.  The vast majority of this journal is about this person’s internal struggle on what to do with his obsession.  Then, he meets someone who offers him a good solution to ‘give him everything’ so he can be happy.  Sounds like someone from Hydra, and then it just stops.  My guess is Hydra finally got him and used their brain washing techniques on him.”

Steve sighed, rubbing his head.  “Okay, so what do we do now?”

Fury shook his head.  “Get Tony back to the tower.  I want you all there with him while I use other assets to get something done about this.  Hydra is dangerous, and someone who is in this mental state and has access to their assets is not going to be a good thing.  Stark’s tower is the best defensive place for him for now.”

The rest of the day was a blur, with everyone getting Tony settled back in at the tower.  The entire ordeal, Tony had been quiet and reluctant to talk to anyone.  Once he’d been settled into his room, he had requested no one bother him.

Of course, Steve was in the mindset that he had to fix things between him and Tony.  He had to tell him how sorry he was for some of the things he’d said and done.  So he found himself outside Tony’s room and building up his courage.

“Friend Steve,” Thor said as he walked by.  “Why are you standing here with such a look on your face?”

Steve looked at Thor.  “I’m debating on how to talk to Tony about…things.”

Thor nodded slowly.  “I believe that telling another person your feelings is the best place to start in matters of the heart,” he said in a surprisingly gentle tone.

“Heart?” Steve said, brows meeting.  “I’m talking about how I’ve misunderstood him, and treated him badly, and made assumptions, I don’t…I’m not…that’s not…” he stammered.

Thor smiled and shook his head.  “Ah, of course,” he said and turned and walked back the way he had come.

Steve blinked after him and then opened the door to Tony’s room, intent on fixing things with him.  Tony was his friend, and he wanted him to know how he felt.  But how did he feel?

“Tony?” he called as he entered the dark, quiet room.

Tony, wrapped up in blankets in the middle of his large bed, rolled over and glared at him.  “I said no one should bother me,” he said, thinking about the fact JARVIS had obviously not listened to him.

“Look, Tony, I’m sorry but I have to apologize,” Steve said as he walked in and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Tony pulled himself to sit up against the headboard and looked at him.  “For what?” he said quietly.

“For not realizing that the Howard Stark I knew and the one you knew weren’t the same man.  I said some terrible things to you and I shouldn’t have. I didn’t think that Howard was capable of being such a terrible father.  And he used me to be that terrible person, and I can’t understand why.”

Tony glanced at his hands and twisted his fingers together.  “I…I wasn’t good enough for him.”

“You should have been, Tony,” Steve said, reaching out and taking one of Tony’s hands.  “You should have been, and you were.  If he couldn’t see it, he was stupid.  You’re a wonderful, good person, Tony.  And you’re stronger than you think.”

Tony chewed his lip for a second.  “I’m toxic to anyone I touch, Cap, so you should just go on now that you’ve given your apology, okay?” he said, pulling his hand away.

Steve felt like he’d been gut punched.  “No,” he said, frowning, and reaching out and grabbing Tony’s hand again.  Tony turned on him, punching him with his other hand.

“Let go of me, dammit!” he said, but his human strength was no match for Steve’s super soldier strength.  “I said, let go!”

Steve shook his head.  “I won’t.  I won’t let you go because you need someone to hold onto you and I’m going to hold onto you no matter what.  I don’t want to lose you.”

Tony growled, growing angry as he punched Steve’s chest with his free hand again.  “Get away, I’ll turn you into something twisted and hurtful just like me, no go on and leave me alone!  You should have let me die to begin with and then no one would have to worry about me and my messed up life!” he screamed finally but Steve held on.

Steve pulled him closer, despite the resistance and put his arms around the smaller man’s body.  “Tony, please, stop, I’m not going to leave you.”

Tony pushed on Steve again and again but stopped exhausted and just sobbed into his chest finally.  “I just wanted to be loved, just to be loved, that was all, and I just messed everything up, all the time, all of them, they always left and I was never good enough, no one wanted me, they wanted what I had…they wanted what I could do, they never wanted me…” he sobbed, beating weakly on Steve’s chest with both fists now and heaving choking sobs.

“Tony, but I want you,” Steve said when Tony had cried himself out.

Tony swallowed and looked up at Steve.  “Why?”

Steve smiled, reaching up and wiping away some of Tony’s tears.  “I…I think it started the first day I met you.  You were so…sure…so strong…and outside that suit, so vulnerable…and so brave.  Tony, I want you to know, I acted the way I did because I was confused.  I didn’t understand why I felt the way I did.”

“I don’t…I don’t understand,” Tony said, brows creasing. 

“Maybe this will help,” Steve said, taking both hands and cupping his face and then leaning close enough to brush lips against him.

Tony’s eyes betrayed his surprise and without thinking he cracked open his lips, and Steve took the invitation, pressing the tip of his tongue against the edge before sliding it into Tony’s rapidly slackening mouth.  Tony didn’t move at first, and Steve worried that he’d been wrong, but then, all at once, Tony moved, his hands reaching up and grabbing Steve’s hair and yanking it as he began to press back.  Steve smiled lightly and let Tony take control, relaxing as Tony began to move closer to him until Steve had to move his hands to his back to hold him in place.

They parted, panting for breath and Tony swallowed.  “You want me still, after…after what they…”

Steve’s face had flushed completely.  “Oh yes, Tony, every bit of me wants you,” he said, nuzzling into Tony’s neck.

“Have you…done this…before,” Tony gasped as Steve’s teeth raked against his collar bone. 

“No,” Steve breathed into his ear as  he began nipping at it gently.  “Just doing what feels good, isn’t that enough?”

Tony nearly jumped out of his skin when Steve slid his hand down the front of the loose pajama’s he was wearing and gripped his rapidly hardening arousal in his hand and began stroking him firmly.  Tony swallowed, his head lolling backward as Steve moved and laid him down on his back, releasing him for a moment while he pulled off own t-shirt and sliding the pajamas off Tony’s hips.  Tony looked up, not sure this was happening or not, sure that this was some kind of joke or some kind of falsehood.  He looked at Steve and by the completely flushed look and dilated eyes that Steve was sporting, he knew it wasn’t a one way street, especially when Steve slid his jeans down over his hips and Tony saw his obvious interest in the current act.

“Oh God, Steve, are you sure you want…me…to be your first…I mean, I’m so…” Tony gasped, stopping talking to arch as Steve leaned down sucked him into his mouth.  “Oh damn,” he whispered.  “Oh, bedside, table…lube…don’t…forget it…” he gasped as Steve stood up and crawled between his legs, kissing up his chest and pausing to suck on each nipple. 

Steve nodded, reaching over and pulling out a small bottle, then Tony heard the click and felt Steve work a finger into him, causing him to gasp in surprise.  “You…said you’d never…” Tony whispered as Steve worked a second then third finger into him, sliding up against his prostate repeatedly.

“I said I’d never done it, I didn’t say I didn’t know what to do,” he breathed.  “There was pornography, even in the forties, but this kind we had to hide a lot better,” he breathed, watching Tony’s entire being come undone at his fingers alone.

Tony didn’t have time to absorb that Captain America just told him he’d seen gay porn when he was younger because he carefully lifted up Tony’s hips and began to ease his dripping cock into him without warning.  Tony gasped because damn, he was super in more ways than one because he had never felt something that size on a living human before.  Steve paused, holding a hand on Tony’s hip, panting.

“Are you okay?” he asked, seeing that Tony’s own interest was fading quickly.  “Do you want me to stop?”

“No, no keep going, just keep going,” he whined using his feet to try and pull him in quicker.  “Takes a minute…oh god I didn’t think I was a fucking size queen but…”

Steve nodded, trying not to rush but trying to seat himself so that Tony could adjust to his size. Tony was panting, and Steve was holding onto his control as tightly as he could because he wanted nothing more than to just fuck Tony as hard as he could until he exploded inside him but he couldn’t.  He could hurt him if he did that. 

“M-move,” Tony said finally, his legs flexing around him and Steve nodded, pulling out a bit before sliding back in, and feeling bolstered by the almost inhuman sound that Tony made.  He leaned down, stilling and captured a kiss then wrapped both arms around him and sat him up on his lap, sliding even deeper inside him.

“Ah, fuck…” Tony muttered.  “Harder, Steve, fuck me harder, I need to be…alive…” he muttered, clinging to him, his own cock trapped between them and causing him to come unglued. 

Steven nodded, sitting up and using his legs to pull almost completely out of him before slamming back into him again and again until he felt Tony’s body stiffen and clamp down on him as he came between them.  Steve grit his teeth together and pumped through the tightness and felt himself tip over the edge, clutching Tony’s body tightly to him as he did so.

Minutes later they both laid entwined in each other’s arms.  Steve ran his hand through Tony’s damp hair and sighed.  “I didn’t come in here for that…I…”

Tony nuzzled into Steve’s loose grip.  “I’m not complaining,” he muttered as he slipped into a dreamless sleep.  Steve sighed, kissing him gently on top of the head and realizing that he was going to do everything to keep him safe.  Everything and anything.


End file.
